Queen of Diamonds
by Ludi
Summary: Still recovering from Vargas' wounds, Rogue and Remy become embroiled in a string of gruesome small-town murders; but they still have their own relationship to sort out. RoGambit with a (complex) noir twist. Rated for mature themes. (Complete)
1. Desperados

**Notes:**  Gambit, Rogue, Phantazia, Pyro, Vargas etc. are copyrighted to Marvel.  All other characters are mine and may not be used without my express permission (like you'd ever want to :p).

Thanks to Lia Brown for her extensive and invaluable knowledge of Phantazia and Pyro; to 'CSI: Crime Scene Investigation' (for help with working the crime scene!);'_The Key to the Tarot'_ by A.E. Waite; '_The Book of Thoth_' by Aleister Crowley (for all that is tarot); '_The Serial Killers'_ by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (for the psychology of killers and technical terms); Bic Runga, Björk and, of course, the Eagles (for the use of their words); my grandmother (for the French, Creole and traditional Catholic stuff); and Angela Carter, Randirogue, Vicki Lew and Letanica (for their marvellous writing and inspiration!)

**Warning:** Contains mature themes – references to and/or scenes of violence, nudity, sex (both consensual and non-consensual), drug abuse, murder and bad language etc.  If you are a minor in your area, or find such themes offensive, please read responsibly (or not at all)!

This fic takes place somewhere between X-Treme X-Men #19 and X-Pose #2.

If I've done anything wrong, as regards to continuity, technical terms and American stuff (since I'm a Brit an' all ;) I'd be grateful if you could let me know!

_- 'Pour mon père, qui regarde sur nous dans la bonté.' -_

* * *

  


****

**. Queen of Diamonds .**

**. I .**

            One thing he remembered clearly from that night.  

(Apart from swigging beer from a bottle, and the tight curve of her ass in those tight leather pants.)  

One thing he remembered was that the song being played was 'Desperado', and the fact that he couldn't stop giggling at it.

            "You're crazy, swamp snake, y'know that?" the girl with the tight ass said.

            _…These things that are pleasin' you can haunt you somehow…_

            "Got a light?" he asked the man behind the bar. "I accidentally blew mine up."

            …_Don't you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy…_

            And then there was the cigarette, and the way the smoke roiled round in his mouth like the worst foul-tasting drug.

            "Ah thought y' said you were givin' that up."

            _…No, the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet…_

            "Are you listenin' to a word ah'm sayin'?"

            Listening?  What the hell did listening mean?  Next morning he wouldn't remember any of this.  God forbid he would.  He looked at the bottle in his hand.  Dark brown and glinting like old blood in sunlight.  He'd lost count.   Totally and utterly.  _…Come down from your fences…_  Of course, it didn't matter.  By the next one he'd have crossed that fine line, and then in some odd ritualistic way he'd be back on that fence and looking out blissfully onto that hazy horizon of no-return.  Come down indeed.  He'd be darned if he was ever gonna come down from them again.

            "Remy, what the hell are you talkin' about?"

            He was still looking down at that cute butt of hers.

            "Was I talkin'?" he managed to slur.

            "Ah think you should stop right about now." The threatening note to her voice was lost on him.  If only her mouth would stop talking at him.  Goddammit he was nearly there.  He was so close to crossing…

            "What're you, chere?" he asked, "You my Queen o' Hearts or my Queen o' Diamonds?"

            Everything else after that was shrouded in the prettiest of blurs.

* * *

  


            There was nothing quite like it, the sultry, still, silent humidity of summer nights in a quaint old southern town.  The arid plain of dusty dirt track, the grasshoppers, invisible, non-existent but for the disembodied sound of their relentless chirping.  The trees, motionless, dyed half indigo, half olive, split down the middle by the shaft of light that splayed out from the bar.  The bar, dead wood on the outside, palpitating with music and laughter and shouting on the inside, an alchemical repository of raucous life.

            Just outside, Lizzie Brown, twenty-something high-flying but aspiring interior designer, sighs and stops and rummages inside her handbag for a pack of cigarettes.  The packet she retrieves is empty.  In rage and despair she flings the crumpled box to the ground.  Everything is going wrong.  Drink, after all, is not the same without a drag.  The short walk back to the motel is not the same without that thin, white stick between her fingers. 

            Earlier that morning, green-haired, brown-eyed Lizzie Brown had wished that she were dead.  She had come to this small-time town to meet her lover, a married man with whom she was having a clandestine affair.  But she had always been given to bouts of depression, of fear, insecurity and mistrust.  Yes – this young woman, liberal, independent, secure in her high-flying career, generous to a fault, and she suffered from mistrust!  But it was true.  True enough for her to believe that her lover still wanted to be with his wife, even though Lizzie so badly wanted his children.  True enough for her to confront him with it, for them to argue about it, and for him to walk out.

            She had wished she was dead, but instead had chosen to drown her sorrows in whiskey and beer.

            Now she recalls the man sitting at the bar, not because he had been smoking, and because she wanted a smoke right now too, but because she had spent most of the night staring at him.  Handsome as the devil, and drunk with it too.  Eyes as red as blood – how apt!  The girl beside him with the skunk stripe in her hair, throwing him looks of the evillest kind.  Lizzie considers going back inside and asking him for a cigarette, before she remembers that he'd borrowed a light from the bartender, and that he was supposed to be giving up smoking anyway (from what the skunk-striped girl had said).

            So she stumbles on into the night.  Her ramshackle motel room is on the other side of the olive and indigo trees and she totters inside stilettos and a nylon mini skirt, totters in a self-piteous, half-drunken stupor.  It is hotter than hot when inebriated.  She fans herself with her handbag.  The trees swallow her.  All she can think about is her lover, and the red-eyed man, and the fresh packet of cigarettes on her bedside table.

            When her murderer pounces, her flailing is as uncoordinated as his gloved hands are precise, and deft, and measured.  She feels his rank breath upon her neck and sees, in the shortest of seconds, that the trees are no longer two-toned but cloaked in inky sable; no light bejewels their shrouded leaves.

            Sharp metal bites, penetrates into her throat; cold, so cold.  Colour spatters across the darkness, wet and sparkling, but by that time she does not see it.

            As she crosses over the hazy horizon of no-return, the only thing Lizzie Brown sees are the red eyes burning like Chinese lanterns in the black, sultry night.

* * *

  


            Next morning Remy still didn't have his answer, partly because he couldn't even remember having asked the question at all.  Something was banging away at his temples with the dull insistence of some heavy, blunt object.  He thought it was the butt of someone's gun.

            "Fuckin' merde…"

            Something was jabbing into the sensitive tract of scar tissue along his chest.  It hurt more than the butt of the gun that was banging away at his temples.  Instinctively he pushed whatever it was away.  Through the crack in his eyes he saw that it was Rogue's shoulder, bare as a baby's butt.

            "What the…?"

            He sat up, rubbing the scar tentatively, having no recollection of where he was or how he had got there.  It ached.  Godammit it ached, and no bloody wonder, the room they were in was so freakin' damp he could feel the moisture in his very bones.  He could feel it, seeping into his skin and pooling round the old wound like a long-forgotten memory of blood surging to the surface.  And then it all came back to him.  The fence.  The line he hadn't crossed.  The finest line he'd ever known; it wouldn't even have taken a step to get to the other side.  He tried to calculate the seconds he had stood looking out blissfully onto that hazy horizon of no-return.  It wasn't just the after-effects of drink that made the task so difficult.

            It was the fact that he was forgetting.

            Memory, so damn imperfect.

            He looked back at Rogue, lying half-dressed in her _ste'pin_[1]between the sheets.  Two weeks on the road and last night was probably the first time since New Orleans that he'd touched her intimately.  Probably.  He just couldn't remember.

            "So who are you, chere?" he murmured.  Same old question, same old silence. "My Queen o' Hearts or my Queen o' Diamonds?"

* * *

  


            Rogue was awakened by the sound of Remy crashing round the motel room like some wild boar, the sounds of which were interspersed with mumblings of 'aspirin, aspirin, my kingdom for some aspirin', or words to that effect.  Hank would have been absolutely horrified.

            "Remy, what is Gawd's name…?" she began, sitting up.  He was pulling at empty draws so violently that one or two of them had actually flown halfway across the room.

            "Aren't there any painkillers round here?" he burst out in despair.

            "Mah God, you're still drunk."

            "Not hardly.  Can't remember any o' last night."

            "You don't say," she glared at him.  His shirt was on back to front; the tag was sticking out above his collarbone.  It would've been funny if she wasn't so damn cross with him.  For two weeks now they had been on the road, and he had been going out of his way to avoid any physical contact with her.  She hadn't made an issue of it – she had, after all, been feeling guilty that she had stolen his one shot at redemption away from him.  And then what had happened?  They'd ended up in this little town, he'd got drunk, and then – only then – had he had the nerve to start pawing her.

            What _she_ remembered – as opposed to what he did, relative to their own peculiar perceptions of the event – was the way his hand had touched her buttocks, and, more specifically, the way his thumb had brushed the rectangle of flesh above her belt and below the hem of her crop top.  And the way he had proceeded, very graphically, to tell her exactly what he wanted to do to her.

            "Go fuck yourself, Cajun!" she'd raged at him instead.

            Through the bleary cobwebs of drunkenness, he had managed an expression of anger.  Pure anger, she should say, because he rarely turned on her in spite, or malice, or violence.  But his face at that moment was indescribable – there was no remorse, no bitterness, no sorrow.  _Those_ were the things she was used to.  But not the look of hatred he had passed her, brief, bold, unequivocal.

            It had probably lasted not more than a second, before he had leapt down from his seat and staggered out of the bar.  Her own rage had probably lasted not more than a few minutes more, and then she too left.  For one thing, she knew she shouldn't have left him to walk back to the motel alone in that state; for another thing, she was still feeling unaccountably guilty; and finally, she was aching for the brush of his thumb against her skin once more.

            "Remy!" she'd called out into the night.

            He wasn't anywhere to be found.

            And then she'd sat on the doorstep of the bar, and cried in utter, inconsolable despair.  It wasn't only because she was in-love with him, and hopelessly incapable of dealing with it.  It was also because, since she'd become 'normal', the psyches in her head had been shifting underneath the dome of her skull like fish stirring underneath the sheer glaze of water.  Memories were resurfacing from the murky depths, memories that seemed vaguely familiar but that she could not place.  How on earth could she answer his question?  How could she say whether she was Queen-of-this or Queen-of-that, when she didn't even know _who_ she was but a made-up name called 'Rogue'?

            Now Remy was staring at her, head cocked to one side, suddenly considering.

            "Did we, y'know, _do_ anyt'ing last night?" he asked her.  He had managed to stand up straight and was shooting something that could only resemble a leer at her.  She realised it was because she was only barely dressed.  Blanching, she snatched the covers to her chest.  Last night, after crying in front of the bar for a good quarter of an hour, she'd trudged back to the motel only to find him out cold and in bed.

            "Damn you," she'd muttered.  She'd wanted to cry again, but instead – unable to resist – she'd stripped down to her underwear and slid in under the covers next to him. "Touch me, you bastard," she'd ordered to his unconscious face.  When he hadn't answered or moved, she'd shifted right up to his side, put her bare arms round him, flesh on flesh (how strange, how sweet!), and had fallen asleep.  In the darkness she had not noticed the two spots of blood that had lain on the mattress between them.

            And now he was looking at her like this, and he couldn't remember a thing.  That was what made it even worse.

            "You're kiddin', right?" she seethed, clutching hard at the duvet. "Look at yah!  Even now you can't even co-ordinate your own two feet!  'Sides, you stank, Remy, you stank real bad!  You think I'd let you near me when you reeked like a beer keg?"

            He winced, but it didn't seem to be from her words.  Instinctively his hand went to his chest.  He'd been doing that often recently, and it had puzzled her.  But she was angry that he had rejected her, and so she decided to ignore it.

            "You embarrassed me, Cajun!" she shouted again. "You embarrassed me in front of the whole bar!  You just _had _to keep on touchin' me up like ah was some cheap li'l hoe from the streets.  An' then…!" She was getting to the climatic part, he could sense it.  He could only look on in amusement as he saw that tousle-haired, half-dressed Mississippi river rat rant at him. "An' then you had the nerve to say those dirty, disgustin' things t' me – in front of everyone – an' even _then_ you wouldn't stop pawin' mah butt!"

            Dieu, she was sexy.  His own skunk-striped little spitfire.  He could barely understand a word she was saying, her accent was so thick.  If only her mouth would stop talking at him…if only she wasn't so mad at him…if only he wasn't so mad at her, he'd –

            He was totally unaware that he was grinning.  Bad idea.

            "Oh, so now y' think it's funny, do yah!" she seethed.

            "I seem t' be havin' some recollection o' last night," he answered evasively.  It was a half-truth.  The only thing that was coming to him right at the moment was staring at her leather-clad ass.  For some reason it seemed okay to relish the memory.  He knew that when he'd sobered up he'd go back to being mad at her again.

            "Good.  An' ah hope it damn well hurts."

            He didn't hear what she said next.

            Running to the bathroom, he doubled over and vomited noisily into the toilet.

            _Touche_, he thought miserably.

* * *

  


            Afternoon; sober-time; Remy had, inevitably, gone back to being mad at her.  Silence had stood between them like an invisible, impenetrable wall.  What had finally permeated it was the unforgettable  scream from next door.  The scream, which pierced through the building like a fire alarm, rousing everyone in the near vicinity into dazed and unreal motion.  Such was its brevity, its shrillness, that Remy's head shattered as if he had not sobered up at all – but the next moment that was forgotten as he raced outside the room to see what on earth was going wrong, Rogue following close behind.

            Outside the room next door, the Mexican maid was babbling and shuddering like a madwoman; underneath the heaviness of her thick and elaborate make-up, the cast of her skin was painfully white.  She was jabbering away in her native language with a lyrical staccato – neither Rogue nor Remy could quite follow what she was saying.  As other people gathered around the evidently frightened and hysterical woman, all she could do was point and point and point at the red, opened door to room #101.

            Blood, blood dripping, one, two, over still-warm flesh.

            That was all Remy could remember before he entered into the little room.

            Lizzie Brown was lying on her bed, nude, anonymous, unmasked to the world, horribly, horribly naked.  If she had stepped away from her body and seen herself, she would have been horrified and ashamed at what she saw.  Her naked flesh, exposed for all those nameless voyeurs to see; naked, unknown, nameless.

            Remy's face was hard and cold as the maid gibbered away at him, one hand clasping his arm as though to suck the strength out of him.  He was hard and cold as he looked at Lizzie Brown whose name he did not know.  Her head rested askance on the headboard as if to regard him with suspicion, but her brown eyes – though wide open – were quite, quite dead.  Caked blood had gathered about her throat and a thin runnel had trickled down between her off-pink breasts and downward, to the obscenely parted legs.  Between her toes grains of dust had clung to her skin; her feet were brown with mud; the remnants of torn and shredded leaves stuck out from between the frozen digits.

            _How I envy you_, he thought, then put the thought away, clanging the metal barred gate shut behind it.  Weird, numb fascination gripped him.  Envy.

            Meanwhile people gasped and cried and tutted; someone raced down the corridor for the manager, another, numbly, went and dialled 911 and called, breathless and disbelieving, for the police.  Some, like Rogue, remained silent.  Her arm pressed against Remy's, her lips were pale in the reflected light from the mirror that hung by Lizzie's bed.  Remy moved, instinctively, to put an arm across her shoulder, to pull her to him, to protect her from the evidence of such corruption, this bastion of depravity, like a protective mother to child.

            "No, no," Rogue protested; nevertheless she leaned into him. "Ah've seen death, ah've seen it before, too many times, too many times to tell."

            The words were strange, divorced from her face, from the tightness of her grip on his arm.  What she meant to add was, _just not like this, just never like this._

            Later the police came, as they always did; Remy was naturally wary, wanting to leave; Rogue had no love for cops either, but she had been sufficiently shocked into convincing him to stay.  The motel manager was in the middle of the melee, eyes darting this way and that, nervous, scared as a rabbit caught face-to-face in the path of a predator.  In his fifties, he was a gaunt, skinny man, but he was not weak, nor was he ineffectual.  One time he had been a wealthy man, not born into a fortune, but the type of man who had worked his way to the top at an early age and knew what it was to suffer.  An associate of Warren Worthington II, he had once shaken hands with the powerful and the influential, with the rich and the famous.  Then he had fallen – as so many of his ilk do – into drug addiction and debt; his wife of ten years had left him and taken with her two children; he would not have seen them in twenty-five years that December.  His left arm still bore the tract marks of syringe needles, if you looked closely; it had taken many years to get rid of the almost perpetual imprint that the belt had left on his wiry bicep, but it was gone now.  A reformed heroin addict; a changed man.  He did not want to remember police.

            "Can you tell me when you're going to finish up here?" he asked the officer in charge.  He stood outside the painfully open door of room #101, yet his eyes flit nervously away from its interior. "Ah have a business to run, y'know, and this is – well, to tell you the truth, this ain't exactly good PR, know what ah mean?"

            The officer's expression was impassive, apart from his mouth, which was very actively chewing gum.

            "Sorry, sir, but we still have t' work the crime scene.  We'll let you know when you can have your room back," he said.

            The manager rubbed his hands nervously.  He waited, expecting the officer to say more.  The officer didn't.  The manager, helpless, half-turned away, but not before he had cast Remy a beseeching look, which Remy immediately took pains to avoid.

            "So you _weren't_ the first on the scene," another cop with a notebook was asking him patiently.

            "No," Rogue replied, clearly, concisely, the perfect witness. "The maid was, like ah said.  We were just one o' the first here b'cause we're stayin' next door.  We heard the scream and came right out."

            The maid was still babbling away in Spanish down the hallway to a woman officer who looked in dire need of an interpreter.

            "So," the cop with the notepad continued. "You heard nothin', saw nothin' last night, right?"

            "We were at the bar across town last night," Rogue answered. "When we got back, we didn't hear or see a thing.  Everythin' was quiet."

            "You came back together?"

            "No; not exactly.  He – Remy – left first, ah came back about…oh, ah dunno, fifteen, twenty minutes later, maybe more."

            "And what time exactly was this?"

            "Ah came back maybe 'bout quarter past eleven."

            Remy remained silent, since he reckoned Rogue was handling things pretty well herself.  He had no desire to talk to the police anyhow – being a 'one-time' professional thief, cops were the enemy, the Red Indians to his errant cowboy.  Best to stay quiet.  To speak only when spoken to, like Tante Mattie's good little boy.  His eyes wandered into the room of the woman who, he'd only recently discovered, was called Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Brown.  White-garbed crime scene investigators were dissecting the scene with mechanical precision.  Lizzie's white feet were sticking in the air like the bloodless extremities of a lifeless mannequin.

            "And could ah have your names please, y'know, just so that we can verify all your details encase we should need to call you as witnesses?"

            That shocked Remy into attentiveness.  His eyes snapped back to those of the officer.

            "Remy LeBeau," he said, after a dread pause.  Unfortunately – worse luck – that was the name he'd scrawled into the book when they'd checked in the afternoon before.  Besides, Rogue had already given his name away.  Amateur.

Ironically, the officer looked at him as though convinced he knew the name to be a false one.

            "And yours, miss?" He turned to Rogue.

            "Anna.  Anna Raven." Rogue returned, without a skip of the beat, without hesitation.  Her tone was almost impulsive.  Remy stared at her in abrupt yet silent surprise.  That was _not_ the name she'd given when they'd checked in yesterday.  Momentary confusion took him, but she did not return his look.  Her face was straight as a board, neutral to the point of self-consciousness.  The officer too looked up at her, eyes probing, sceptical.  Remy knew what he was thinking.  _Two jokers under two assumed names.  Must think I was born yesterday.  Obviously here on a dirty weekend while their partners are at home thinking they're on 'business'.  Poor suckers.  Yup, same old story.  Some things never change._

            The officer pursed his lips, and noted down the names in a deliberate and disbelieving calligraphy.

            "Hey guys, look at this!  What the hell d'you think it could mean?"

            Inside room #101, the crime scene investigators were milling by the bedside.  Remy saw that one of them was holding up a pair of tweezers; gripped in between its metal jaws was a thick slip of paper.  A card.  His heart began to pound.

            "What?  I already covered the bed and didn't see it.  Where was it?"

            "Underneath her left hand.  Palm covered it right up.  The killer obviously put it there."

            "Shit.  You know what this means, don't you?  His MO[2] – organised, ritualistic.  This son of a bitch is gonna kill again."

            "Ah think we should leave them to it," the officer was saying to Rogue and Remy, moving to usher them away from the crime scene.  "In the meantime, you just stay in town, right?  Like I said, we might need to call you up as witnesses."

            Remy's eyes though, were on the jaws of the tweezers.  As the officer herded them away, he saw clearly the image on the card, spattered with faded brown blood, shining in reflected sunlight.

            A tarot card.

            The _Queen of Pentacles._

* * *

  


[1] Underwear.

[2] _Modus operandi_ – 'mode of operation'.


	2. Symbols & Weapons

**. II .**

            Eileen Harsaw, 6'2", 171 lbs., blonde hair, blue eyes, 31 or 28 years of age, depending on her mood; PhD, member of Mensa, former Lecturer in Astrophysics, currently Head CSI; mutant, ex-terrorist, former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, alias – Phantazia.

            A man with an eye for the beautiful and the ambitious might have marked her out for a career in modelling, but Eileen had had an extra something that would never have been conducive to such a profession.  It was not pride.  It was not arrogance (of which Eileen certainly had plenty).  Nor was it even her rare and brilliant mind.  It was, in fact, something called 'ideology'.  And Eileen was ideological to a fault.

            It was ideology that had led her into the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.  It was ideology that had led her to turn down Erik Lensherr's offer to join him on Asteroid M and become a member of his elite coterie of Acolytes[1].  It was ideology that had caused her to fall in love with St. John Allerdyce, world-renowned author of Gothic noir novels and world-class traveller, known better in mutant circles by the immortal codename of 'Pyro'. (And whose death at the hands of a flatscan assassin she had, incidentally, mourned silently and without shedding a tear.  Perhaps if she had seen him pass away in person and not on TV, she would have found it in her to cry.  But those were the dreams of the romantic, bawdy noir novels that he had written.)

            And finally, it was ideology that had caused her to turn away from the Brotherhood and walk out into the Real World, leaving all thought of mutant powers behind.

            The Death of Ideology, alias – Disillusionment.

            After being exposed as a mutant in Harvard University, she'd white-lied her way into the Jackson CSI unit, and looked back only once.  

            That was when she had seen St. John's boil-infested body dying so unceremoniously on TV.

            Now she was sitting in her lab, microscope at her right side, a Petri dish of dried, brown soil sitting untouched nearby.  Something was bothering Eileen Harsaw, and she was rarely bothered about anything; despite the kind of deaths she had seen, despite the kinds of bodies she had witnessed, bodies cold, bodies warm, bodies unbroken, bodies mutilated, bodies ravished, bodies as crimson with blood as if newborn, bodies as white as old, sludgy snow.

            She had, on her hands, a potential serial killer.  _Modus operandi_ – organised (Ms. Brown's body, killed away from the initial crime scene, dragged/carried/transported to her lodgings not three hundred yards away); and ritualistic (Ms. Brown's body, stripped, arranged spread-eagled on her bed, displayed – sacrificially – for all who entered the room to see instantaneously; a clod of wet earth inserted into her closed mouth).  Victim, killed in the small patch of woodland that separated the bar from the motel (Ms. Brown's feet had lost its stilettos in the woods, and had gathered up traces of dirt and leaves between its toes – evidence of which lay in bags marked D, E and F).  Indications of a sexual motive (Traces of semen left on the victim's body, evidently after the initial murder had occurred – vagina burnt in order to destroy trace DNA [clever bastard]).  Weapon, most likely a thin, sharp blade (Single laceration to the throat, puncturing both the jugular and the carotid, almost to the point of…)

            Eileen paused, laid down her pen and gazed blankly at her notes.  It was not any of this that was bothering her.  It was something else.

            Beside her left elbow rested a flat, clear, polythene bag.  Turning, Eileen reached inside and brought out the contents.  Between her latex-gloved fingers, the tarot card glared at her in an eloquent silence, still smeared in dried, faded blood.

            '_The Tarot is symbolism; it speaks in no other language and offers no other signs…'_

            In which case, what did the _Queen of Pentacles_ signify?

            Eileen turned the card around in her hand thoughtfully, flipped it this way and that, considering.  The Queen, horned like the devil, dressed in green, a disc in her arms and goat at her feet.  The Queen was…Lizzie Brown?

            "Ms. Harsaw?"

            Eileen snapped out of her reverie.  Framed in the door of her lab was one of her subordinates, a serious-minded young man named simply 'Jones', and whose only distinguishing feature was that he wore thick-rimmed glasses.

            "Yes, Jones?" she asked.  Imperious, her voice was.  She might well have been a queen herself.

            "We tried talking to the maid," he replied, almost apologetically, as though his presence offended her. "Luckily we managed to get an interpreter in, but she didn't have anything new to tell us.  All she did was open the door, see the body, then run right out again.  She was too shocked to see anything, she said.  She said that two of the other witnesses saw more than she did, because they came into the room with her after she called for help, while she was still too shocked to look."

            "I see," Eileen mused. "I suppose we should call on these two witnesses.  Names?"

            Jones stared down at a notebook in his hand.

            "Uhm – they'd be Remy LeBeau and Anna Raven.  Officer in charge thinks the names are false.  They could be tricky.  You wanna talk to them personally?"

            Eileen Harsaw's eyes were momentarily incredulous.  Remy LeBeau?  She knew that name.  She'd only met him a couple of times – but she knew the name all right.  Remy LeBeau, alias – Gambit.

            The tarot card flipped about absently between her fingers.

            Tarot cards, playing cards.

            Symbols and weapons both.

            She grimaced.

            "Yes.  I _would_ like to talk to them," she said.

***************************************************************

            Everything seemed different when he wasn't drunk.  Everything was outlined with some inexorable clarity.  That blurred edge, that indistinct fine line was lost to the Real World.  It instilled in Remy a sense of profound disquiet.  Why was he so divorced from everything?  Why was everything so divorced from everything else?  That was why it pained him to touch her.  Because even if he did, touching her felt less than real.  It was all her fault anyway – she couldn't really blame him for feeling this way.  She was the one who'd dragged him away from the edge; the edge over which everything was blissful, and right, and proper and true, simply because it held none of the clarity that human mortality lent to life.  She couldn't understand.  She couldn't understand what it was like to taste that light, to be withheld from it, and to return to what was only a paler shade of existence.

            That was why he was being quiet.  That was why he didn't really care that she was taking these back roads at God-knew-how-many-miles-per-hour.  Because even if she did happen to lose control, at least then he'd end up where he was rightfully meant to be.

            He looked up at the road ahead.  Not a car, not a truck in sight.

            Damn.

            On the other hand, there was something rather romantic and nostalgic about sitting on the back of the motorbike, letting her take the lead, giving himself into the passive activity of simply remembering.

            It was easy to remember as he sat there, arms wrapped around her waist, thighs cupping her hips, pressing himself against her backside and daydreaming of being in a different (yet achingly similar) position.  He was almost humming to himself as he idly studied the nape of her neck.  _Yup, he thought, _Michelangelo eat your heart out.  Marble's a waste o' money in comparison to dis_.  Unlike marble though, skin was made to be touched.  It was also that much harder to steal.  Not _that_ much harder for a thief of his repertoire.  But where Rogue was concerned, nothing was as simple as it seemed._

_            They'd only given into temptation twice.  One – that crazy night in Antarctica.  Two – the night after she'd picked him up from the airport after that equally insane time-jaunt[2].  Perfect imperfect memory.  He remembered sitting up against her like this, with his cheek against her shoulder blade and his hands clasped about her midriff.  Her hair had been longer then.  He'd just sat there and nestled his face in it.  He hadn't a clue what shampoo she'd been using back then.  But it had smelt good.  Real good, and definitely different from what she used now._

            For the moment the haziest of memories became clear to him, and he was lost in lilac shades of lavender scent.

            "Remy, you're _hard_!"

            Rogue was shouting at him over the whirring of the engine, and the nebulous memory of hair and perfume dissipated.  Suddenly he was back on the road again, battling against the wind, turning a blind corner at a speed even Evel Knievel would have found galling.  It took a moment for her words to register.

            "I'm what?!  Oh.  Right." He figured he should be feeling more embarrassed than he actually was.

            "You better get rid o' that, sugah," she shot at him accusingly. "It's givin' me goosebumps."

            He was going to tell her that a good case of _les_ _freesons[3] wasn't always a bad thing, but decided against it.  He didn't think she'd appreciate the innuendo.  Instead he slackened his grip on her a little.  It wasn't exactly what he wanted to do, considering the speed she was going at, but either way, he was going to be in trouble.  __Lose-lose situation, Gambit, he thought wryly.  Or perhaps it was win-win.  He wasn't really sure whether he cared about love or life anymore._

            "Chere," he yelled, out of a lingering sense of duty, "You _do know that you're not invulnerable anymore, don't you?!"_

            She did not reply.  Instead she swerved onto the grass verge and ground the bike to a halt, leapt down from the seat and strode off, her back to him.  He watched her silently as she paused by the side of tree and punched it viciously.  Once upon a time – not that long ago, mind you – a punch like that would have felled the tree in one deadly swoop.  Now her fist connected with the raw, unyielding bark and she cried out, her fury negated by the jolting yet unfamiliar shock of pain.  She turned away, her shoulders crumpled, nursing her bleeding hand with the other.

            "Ah want to leave," she stated, her voice muffled.

            "Can't leave, chere," he answered calmly, "We been sequestered.  'Sides, we skip town now, we get in trouble wit' de cops an' dat's somet'ing I don' personally want t' deal wit' right now."

            She laughed coldly. "You're kiddin', right?  You, master thief and Patriarch of the Unified Guilds, scared o' the police?"

            "Sometimes, chere, it's best not t' go paradin' yourself in front o' de jaws of de lion.  Not until y' know how you gonna outsmart it first," he said.

            Her shoulders fell again, her head dropped.  She shuddered like leaves whipped up by an autumn wind.

            "Ah want t' go home," she whimpered, like a petulant child.

            "Where exactly_ is _home?" he asked her.

            "Anywhere but here!" she burst out bitterly.  Her voice shook with tears.  Only then did he leap down and go to her, but he could do no more than lay one hand upon one shoulder, and even then his fingers were cold and uncertain.

            "Rogue, look, I know it hurts, chere.  An' right now I wish t' God dat you hadn't seen what we all saw dis afternoon.  But we gotta t'ink rational about dis, right?  We gotta help dat poor girl get some justice, an' right now de best we can do for her is stay here."

            Rogue turned to him, eyes moist, blazing.

            "Ah don't care about her!  Ah care about _us!  An' ah don't want t' stay!  Ah don't want to stay here anymore!" She began to cry again, and he held her to him, but his hands were on her shoulders. "Why won't you touch me?" she wailed into his chest. "Why have you changed so much?  Do you hate me, Remy?  Do you?  'Cos last night you had to be drunk, you had be drunk before you would touch me, before you would tell me y' wanted to fuck me, an' you can't remember any of it, not one li'l bit, an' it hurts, it hurts so goddamn much!"_

            He was silent, flipping round two extremes inside his head and unable to work out which one was her and which one was not.

            "An' that woman," she continued, voice now thick and flat, "that poor woman, she was lookin' at you all night, an' ah don't know why, maybe ah'm crazy, but ah keep on thinkin' what if ah was her?  What if ah was her?  B'cause ah left that stupid bar not long after her, an' it could've been me; an' ah couldn't find you anywhere after you left, you'd disappeared, so what if ah had been the victim an' you weren't there to…"

            She trailed off on a sharp intake of breath.  Something had shocked her into silence, but she didn't know what it was.  She stepped back, uncertain of what it was that she'd just been enlightened with.  Her green eyes gazed back up into his red ones, searching.  So hopelessly in-love that love had withered in on itself.  How far gone was it?  How corrupted was their love?

            "Ah tried so hard t' bring you back t' me," she whispered, holding his bare hands between her bare hands.  The bruises on her knuckles stood out like sprigs of blossoming heartsease.  How sweet, how bitter!  To finally touch and to want so much more! "Doesn't that mean anythin' t' you?"

            "It means your love is strong, p'tite," he answered softly. "But that it ain't strong enough t' let me go."

            "Ah've let you go too many times t' make the same mistake again," she admitted, cheeks pale and tear-stained. "An' whatever you want, ah ain't gonna let you slip away from me again."

            Stalemate.

            She wanted to give, he would not accept.

            All the way back to the motel, a memory from another life haunted him, the memory of lavender scented hair.

***********************************************************************

            Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since Lizzie Brown had lost her life.  The night was as humid as the night before; Rogue was in the shower, basting her skin with gel and foam, washing away, as she perceived it, a day's worth of tainted experience.  Remy, on the other hand was in the room, cursing.  Taking his trenchcoat off, he had only just realised that his black shirt was half-wet with a huge, dark blot of blood, right on the spot where Vargas' scar was.  And then, on the crisp, white bed linen that no one had seen fit to change – due to the traumatic events of the day – he'd noticed two spots of the same crimson liquid, dried, bold and unambiguous as two glinting red rubies.

            "Merde."

            In a flurry of movement he'd stripped off his shirt, and ripped away the bed linens with the greatest alacrity.  The bundle of offending material now in his arms, he took the opportunity to gaze down and gingerly inspect his bare chest.  Blood was smeared ever so slightly on the taut skin near the scar.  He cursed again.  Evidence of …what?  He did not know what exactly.  He was scared of the blood.  He dabbed it away with a tissue and threw it in the waste basket, just as Rogue was coming out of the bathroom.

            "Remy, what in tarnation are you doin'?"

            He knew he must've looked strange, standing there without his shirt on, the white bed linens piled in his arms.  He didn't particularly care – all he was praying at the moment was that she didn't smell the metallic tang of fresh blood.

            "Not'ing, chere, I'm just changin' de bedclothes is all," he replied as innocently as he could.

            "Changin' the bedclothes?" Her voice held the sarcastic note of a housewife who knew she'd never catch her husband doing household chores unless he wanted something outside of the kitchen.

            "Yeah," he replied, dropping his load carefully so that his shirt was lost underneath the starchy mass of white cotton.  He began to pull off the duvet cover. "No one came t' do it today, what wit' all de commotion an' all, so, y'know…"

            "You thought _you'd_ do it?" Rogue's look was incredulous.  She paused. "Where's your shirt?"

            "Gonna put it in de laundry," he returned, a little too quickly.

            "Remy, what are you up to?"

            "Not'ing, _ma mignonne_."

            "You ain't called me that in ages.  Are you angling for somethin'?  B'cause if you are, you're mistaken if you think that bein' shirtless an' doing the chores is even remotely sexy t' me."

            "Gambit's anglin' for not'ing," he answered.  That at least was the truth.  In some ways, after their conversation earlier on, he wished it wasn't.  It probably would have kept her happy if he _had been angling.  It certainly would also have stopped her from looking at him in the blatantly suspicious manner she was bestowing him with right now. "Like he said, he's changin' de bed linen," he finished, with a note of finality._

            Having completed his task, he heaved the whole bundle into his arms, taking care not expose his black shirt underneath it all.  Then he turned to the door and pulled it open.

            "Won't be long," he told her.  Even as he made his escape he could feel the disbelief of her gaze boring into his back like gimlets.

            He made his way down to the laundry room, carrying the load like some precious parcel.  Down the corridor, turn right at the corner.  It was as he was turning right that he bumped into the balding, scrawny manager.  The linens in his arms lurched ominously.

            "Sorry," Remy muttered, heart racing, shifting the bundle into its previous position. "Shouldn' have been takin' dat corner de way I was."

            "No, ah'm sorry, son," the manager half-smiled.  His lips were yellow and nervous. "Ah should've been paying more attention."

            "You've had a lot on your mind today," Remy returned the half-smile.  All he really wanted to do was forget the niceties and race to that laundry room. "Can't blame you for bein' distracted."

            "It's terrible, terrible," the manager shook his head, brow furrowed. "That poor woman, in _mah_ motel, _mah motel.  Who would've guessed…  It's just _weird_ you know, unreal…  It shouldn't be happenin' t' good folks like us.  And honestly, what kind of a reputation am ah going to have after all this dies down?  What kind of a reputation?"_

            The man shook his head again, tutting, trembling – too much heroin from his previous life.  Now his eyes were on the bundle in Remy's arms.

            "Expect it'll all blow over in time," Remy replied. "Jus' gotta accept dat sometimes dese t'ings happen."

            The manager looked less than convinced, but he nodded.

            "Say, aren't you one of those guys that was first on the scene?" he asked, by way of making conversation.  He'd obviously lost the art since his days of wealth and power.

            "Yup.  I'm stayin' in de room next door," Remy explained after he moment, eyes wandering.  All he wanted to do was getting to that friggin' laundry room…

            "Oh yeah, room 100, ah remember now, with that girl, that pretty girl with the white stripe in her hair…" The man was almost babbling, as if desperate to make small talk, as if frantic for some sense of normalcy.  Remy almost felt sorry for him.  The man's eyes were looking up into his with an almost ravenous expression, hungry for acceptance.

            "Yeah.  My Queen o' Diamonds," he replied, impulsively, not knowing quite why he'd said it.

            "Queen of Diamonds?" the thin man repeated in confusion.

            "Pet name," Remy returned, after a moment.  What the _fuck_ was he talking about?

            "Heh.  Hard as nails, you mean?" the older man said with a knowing smile.

            "She _can be ruthless," he admitted, not knowing why he was confiding in this stranger. "But she can also be…" He faltered.  The pang in his chest ached.  The ache in his chest panged.  Had a part of him crossed the line into death after all?  Because when he thought of making love to her, it seemed to be a lifetime away…_

            The manager regarded him, head cocked, one corner of his mouth raised.  At last he nodded vigorously, humorously.

            "Ah understand, ah understand completely.  Women, eh?  Ah was married once, y'know.  Pained me.  Pained me hard." He sighed. "Women," he repeated sombrely, as if he remembered his wife, as if he remembered Lizzie Brown, and the word faded on his lips, and there was regret in his eyes.  Then he shook himself, and held out his hand to Remy. "Ah'm Chase, Chase Beddows.  Manager of this place, but probably not for very much longer."

            Whatever that meant.  Remy shifted his bundle into the other arm and shook the man's hand.  He was distracted.  He wanted to get away.

            "Remy LeBeau," he murmured in acknowledgement.

            "Nice to meet you, Mr. LeBeau," Chase nodded amiably. "And since you've been sequestered, ah guess you an' your girlfriend will be seeing a lot more of me over the next few days." He sighed again. "Damned cops."

            Remy nodded absently.  The wet patch on his shirt was soaking into his left arm.

            "Well, ah'll let you get to it," Chase said. "Got a broken sink to check out.  Oh, and by the way, tomorrow the maids will be back to work, so you won't need to worry about doing all that laundry stuff yerself, okay?"

            "Great."

            Chase Beddows left.

            Remy practically ran to the laundry.

*******************************************************************

            Rogue had been combing out her hair and staring into the mirror, when she'd noticed the bloody tissue inside the waste basket underneath the dressing table.  She'd stared at it for a long while, pulling the comb through the strands of her hair, her eyes faintly troubled.  But she did nothing.  She did not stop combing her hair, and she did not bend over to inspect what she saw.  She stood there, combing, until Remy returned, fresh linens in his arms.  He looked like he'd been running.

            "Everythin' okay, sugah?" she asked nonchalantly.

            "Yup, _bien," he replied, and got to work putting on the bedclothes once more._

            It was when he'd finished that the knock at their door came.  Rogue answered it, while Remy pulled on a white T-shirt.  The woman at the door was much taller than Rogue and was blonde haired and blue eyed.

            "Can ah help you?" Rogue asked, looking the woman up and down, only for the woman to look her up and down in return.

            "Jackson crime lab," the woman replied at last. "Can I speak to you please?"

            "This is to do with the murder?" Rogue asked, plaintive.

            "Yes."

            Rogue stepped back and the woman walked in.  Remy eyed her in the mirror.  She looked far too attractive to be a CSI, but then he should have learnt by now that no one should judge a book by its cover.  Or a cover by the book inside, he added to himself wryly.

            "Won't you sit down?" Rogue offered, pointing to one of only two chairs in the room as she closed the door to.  One thing Rogue hadn't bargained for, and that was that too much of normal life meant being polite.  Rogue's brand of politeness had been borrowed from classic films and romantic fiction.  Her manners were as stale and stilted and melodramatic as her nature was tough and fiery and passionate.

            "Thank you."

            The woman sat down in the most comfortable chair.  She took up a notepad from her pocket and ran her eyes over it; Remy knew that she was pretending to read.  His suspicions immediately heightened.

            "So," the woman said, looking up at him from under shiny black eyelashes. "You're Remy LeBeau, right?  And you," her eyes flicked to Rogue. "You're Anna Raven.  The name you gave when you registered here yesterday was different.  May I ask why?"

            Rogue blushed – she was that good that Remy couldn't even tell whether she was faking or not. "Well… ah ain't actually supposed t' be here," she replied, voice coy with embarrassment. "Mah husband thinks…"

            "I see," the woman interrupted coolly. "So Anna Raven would be your real name then?"

            Rogue nodded mutely.  But there was nothing false about her expression.  Nothing false at all.  It was entirely as if she'd just answered the truth.

            The woman scribbled something into her pad.  It was, most likely, a load of rubbish.

            "So," she began quietly, still scribbling. "The Rogue has a name after all.  Anna Raven – what a strange, touching name."

            Rogue stood stock-still, as if she'd been shot.  Her eyes were suddenly wide.  Remy took a step forward, red eyes blazing.

            "Just how the hell d' you…?"

            "I suggest you keep quiet, Remy LeBeau – or should I say, Gambit?" the woman cut in, shooting him a fierce look. "It might be safer – a lot safer – for you if you say nothing."

            Remy clamped his mouth shut.

            "Who are you?" Rogue asked.

            "Eileen Harsaw, head CSI." Eileen flashed an ID card at them, then put it away abruptly, knowing that it meant nothing. She sat back in the creaky chair, her countenance faintly sardonic. "It seems a little ironic, doesn't it, that the last time we met was in the fairytale realm of the superhero and the supervillain, and that now – so many years later – we meet again under the futile guise of the normal human 'flatscans'." She paused, and her smile was wan. "For us, it is humanity that is the mask, isn't it?  Normality is the fallacy.  We are frauds in a world that disowns us.  In that, we are the same.  And as such, you have nothing to fear from me – yet."

            "Phantazia," Remy spoke through gritted teeth.  The look she passed him was almost one of surprise.

            "You have a good memory," she admitted begrudgingly. "Considering we barely met.  Considering neither of you even saw my face."

            "Supervillain or no, women always have a certain perfume," he replied mockingly. "An' a certain way o' speakin' down t' others."

            "Ah." She looked half amused, half chastised.  Rogue moved away from the door slowly, like a rat caught in a corner.

            "What do you want from us?" she asked.

            "What my job requires me to ask of you," Eileen replied simply. "It would seem that fate has brought us together in a rather more mundane manner than on previous occasions; or perhaps not as mundane as we think." She sat back again, considering. "You both feel…strange to me.  The electrical currents inside you are…different.  Fluctuated.  Changed.  Especially with _you.  Do you prefer to be called Anna these days?  Or is she as make-believe as the Rogue?" She grinned at Rogue. "You're both currently powerless, aren't you?  I suppose that must be a godsend to you, Anna.  Isn't it nice, to feel him inside you when he fucks you?"_

            Rogue blushed.  Not from embarrassment, not at the bluntness of the question, but from shame.  Because she didn't really know.  Because she was empty as an old, cavernous well, and she hated to admit it.

            "If you're quite done tauntin' us den I suggest you get out," Remy spoke up icily. "Unless you actually have a point in comin' here."

            Eileen's face was quite calm.

            "Actually, I came here to ask _you_ a question." She lifted up the tiny notebook, scanned it briefly. "The police records show that you left the bar last night before Anna did.  What were you doing, in the time between you left her and the time she got back to your room?"

            Remy's face went pale.  It made his eyes seem to flash all the more.

            "Are you insinuatin'…?"

            "I asked you a question, Mr. LeBeau," Eileen interrupted coldly.

            "You mean t' say you actually _suspect_ me?" he raged. "_Fuck_ you!  What you suggestin' is bullshit!  I'd never touch an innocent woman, never do the kind o' sick things dat freak did t' dat lady!  _Fuck _you!  I don' have t' answer your goddamn questions!"

            "It's in your best interest to do so, Mr. LeBeau."

            "No!  I don't have t' answer a goddamn t'ing!"

            "Just answer the question, Remy." Rogue's voice was small, low.  He stared at her, jaw tensing; then back at Eileen.

            "I was comin' back t' de motel," he finally answered through clenched teeth. "An' den I went t' bed."

            "You came straight back?"

            Remy nodded.

            "And what time did you arrive back here?"

            He glared at her.

            "I don't know."

            "No clue?"

            "No."

            "Not even a rough estimate?"

            "No!"

            Eileen was silent, disbelieving.  Rogue looked on, arms crossed about her as if she were cold.  Her eyes were darting back and forth between them, resting every so often, imperceptibly, on the dressing table opposite her.

            "He was drunk," she spoke up softly. "He wouldn't remember."

            "I see.  And your clothing?  What were you wearing on the night of the murder?" Eileen persisted relentlessly.

            Remy stared blankly.  Now that his rage was passing, his face had gone deathly white.  He couldn't speak.  Couldn't say a thing.

            "He was wearing those pants," Rogue offered again. "And the shirt…" She paused, took in a breath. "He put it in the laundry."

            "The laundry."

            Eileen's voice was sharp, punctuated as a cold winter morning.  Her clear, blue eyes lifted to his, the words behind them as unambiguous as headlights.  His rage flared again.  That she should suspect him – _him _– of murdering an innocent, unknown woman in cold blood when he could not even bear to touch the woman he loved…  Loved?  Yes, loved.  Maybe, too much, or maybe too little, he couldn't tell.  It didn't matter.  Irrelevant.  Even if he _could find it in himself to touch Rogue, dammit, he'd never kill a defenceless woman.  He'd killed enough wicked men to know that to kill was not right._

            Tainted; hands tainted as filth; wicked beyond repair.  The Pig, Sinister, the Morlocks, New Son…Live to fight another day, and all with hands tainted as muck and filth.

            "Get out!" he suddenly roared, his wrath all the more fearful for the fact that he did not move a muscle, not an inch. "_Get out_!"

            Eileen stood, placid in the eye of the storm.  Her expression was as stone.

            "It's late," she stated matter-of-factly. "I'll leave you for now.  But I'll be back tomorrow to resume my questioning." To turned to Rogue, scornful, derisive. "Don't worry, Anna, I'll see myself out."

            She strode to the door, left with her contempt thick in the air.  As soon as her footsteps had died away, Rogue strode to the dressing table and bent down over the waste basket.

            "De fuck she comes back here tomorrow!" Remy exploded. "Who de hell does she t'ink she is, accusin' me like dat?!" Rogue said nothing, stood upright, looked him in the eye.  Between her fingers he saw the bloody tissue hanging with the baleful portent of some blood-drenched noose.

            "How long has this been in here?" she asked him, steely quiet.

            "I…" he began, gaping.

            _Blood, blood dripping, one, two, over still-warm flesh._

            He swallowed, bile suddenly thick in his throat.

            "I didn't do it, chere," he whispered hoarsely.

            Wordlessly Rogue took the tissue into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.  Then she returned, and put her arms round him as if to say: _I know you didn't._

            But her mouth said nothing.

***********************************************************************

[1] X-Men Unlimited #2.

[2] Gambit #16, although that's just speculation on my part.

[3] Goosebumps.


	3. Duality

**. III .**

Eileen had spent the better part of the previous night reading ravenously, gluttonously, as she always did.  The book that had so captured her attention had been given to her by her assistant CSI, Dom Jones.  Now, driving in her car, face grim with the expectancy of her first interview of the day, it rested on the vinyl passenger seat beside her.  _The Book of Thoth (Egyptian Tarot) by The Master Therion, alias – Aleister Crowley.  She had always believed the long-dead Crowley to be some sort of hocus-pocus magician at worst, and some perverted high priest of the profane at best.  The pedantic, unassuming Jones, however, had insisted that the man was a genius, an enlightened prophet, an inspiration.  Who just happened to have written a book on the tarot._

            This book – _The Book of Thoth_ – was not one of those tomes that one so easily finds in the religious/spiritual/occult section of one's local bookstore.  It was not tawdry, it was not spurious, it was not flowery or ostentatious.  It was dense, almost to the point of unreadable.  It dealt with the arcane in an academic and specific manner – as much as such subjects could be approached.  It was also highly mathematical.

            In short, it was just the kind of book that Eileen Harsaw loved to read.

            Her car ground to a halt on the dirt track just outside the motel.  Now she felt equipped.  Now she felt she had ammunition. Now she felt prepared.

            With the slightest of smiles, she donned her sunglasses and got out the car.

            Remy was sprawled out on the floor of the room, playing solitaire (aptly, she thought), weighing up the cards in his hands with an overstated consideration.  Eileen sat quietly in the chair to his left, looking on.  He looked almost like a schoolboy, sullen, silent, begrudging.  Not for the first time she felt the strange electrical currents playing off and around him.  Odd, to say the least.  She ignored it.  That wasn't why she was here.

            "Where's Anna?" she asked him, her voice breaking into the quiet so clumsily that it felt sacrilegious; damaging, indeed, to the precision of his game.

            "Gettin' lunch," he muttered, laying down a card.  Ten of Clubs over Two of Hearts. "Still gotta eat in this godforsaken cesspit, neh?"

            "Is that really her real name?"

            "How should I know?"

            "You're lovers."

            He grunted, whether as an assent or as a negation she did not know.

            "As far as I know, it's a _nom de guerre_," he replied, shortly. "She ain't told me otherwise.  She's never told me her real name.  'Some t'ings should stay personal' [1], she said t' me.  Why should she start tellin' me t'ings now?"

            "I see."

            Silence.

            "So, did you know Lizzie Brown?" Eileen queried.

            "Nope.  Didn' even know her name till you CSI's started shoutin' it round everywhere." Eight of Clubs over Four of Diamonds.

            "So you never knew her."

            "_Non.  Why should I?"_

            "We can verify that, you know?"

            "Go ahead.  Dis Cajun's got not'ing t' hide."

            Silence again.  Eileen leaned in to watch his game better.  The cards – red, white and black – were a pattern of harmony, of colour, of symbol, of algebra.  He touched their edges with the reverence of a priest consecrating bread and wine.

            "Do you own tarot cards?" she questioned him softly.  He paused, stiffening, the King of Clubs held in mid-air.

            "_Non," Remy answered at last, placing the card down carefully._

            "No?"

            "I was brought up a Roman Catholic," he rejoined matter-of-factly. "Tarot cards, horoscopes, ouija boards, crystal balls, scryin'…Dey all evil, chere.  Evil, an' fortune-tellin'.  I may not be a practisin' Catholic, but de habits o' childhood, they die hard, right?" His tone was laced with sarcasm. "If _mon père_ had ever caught me handlin' de tarot, most likely he woulda beat me."

            "You were brought up with the Creoles," she persisted, obliquely.

            "Superstitious people, _oui_, but god-fearin', none de less.  More so than I ever was." He paused, glancing at her askance. "Voodoo magic was their domain, 'Eileen', not mine."

            "But the cards, the playing cards…They hold a special meaning to you, don't they?"

            Again, he paused, before laying down another card. "I owe de cards my life [2].  In dat, dey mean somet'ing t' me.  But at de end o' de day, I throw them away.  Blow 'em up, and throw them away."

            Nevertheless his voice was oddly repentant.  Wordlessly he completed the game, gathered up the cards, shuffled them up with an expert hand.  Eileen sat back, lifting her arm to rest along the back of the chair.

            "Did you know that our modern playing cards are derived from the tarot?" she said at last.  He did not look at her, his hands still busy shuffling.  The cards were a blur between his fingers and she could not help staring on, fascinated.

            "What's dat s'pposed t' mean t' me?" he asked sourly.

            "A tarot card was found by the dead body," she answered.

            "Heh.  And you t'ink I was de one who left it dere?" His grin was wry. "Jus' 'cos I play wit' cards?"

            "No.  Because you use them as weapons."

            He stopped.  His eyes were suddenly gleaming a fiery red.  He leaned forward and set out the cards for solitaire again, but said nothing.

            "The card that was left by the body was the _Queen of Pentacles_," Eileen continued steadily. "In the modern pack, she equates to the Queen of Spades.  Each card in the pack has a certain state, a certain condition, circumstance or personality trait attributed to it.  The _Queen of Pentacles – or Spades, whatever you want to call her – represents a certain type of woman.  In her positive aspect she is generous, secure, liberal, opulent.  In her negative aspect she is suspicious, fearful and full of mistrust." She halted, seeing that he would not look at her, and her anger and impatience flared. "I'm going to ask you again, Mr. LeBeau – did you know Elizabeth Brown?!"_

            At the words he swung round at her, eyes flashing in that unearthly glow of theirs and for a moment, Eileen drew back, stunned.

            "I didn't know de _fille_!" he hissed. "You can check my background all you want, you can insinuate all you want, I didn't know her!  An' I sure as hell didn't kill her!"

            He turned away again, jaw clenching and unclenching, eyes glaring at the cards down below as if he'd burn right through them.  For the first time Eileen stood, uncertain.  What did she truly believe?  Did she truly believe that he was the murderer?  Just because of some cards?  He was holding one of them in his hand right now.  The Queen of Diamonds, a single, woebegone card amongst many.  She did not know.  She simply didn't know.

            "The murderer is going to kill again, Remy," she spoke quietly. "And he's working in a pattern, I just can't tell what it is yet.  The cards mean _something_ to you.  If you think of something…"

            His face was suddenly still and calm.  He laid down that solitary card in his hand with a kind of resignation.

            "I don' know what de cards mean," he returned at last. "I only know what dey mean t' me.  I'm sorry.  I can't help you."

            Eileen watched him a little while longer, until she realised that his eyes kept wandering over to the clock and that he was waiting for Anna.

            Without saying any further words, she turned and left.

*********************************************************

            Rogue returned with lunch to find Remy standing at the end of the bed with his back to her, looking down at something that she couldn't see.  His stance was considering – legs slightly spread, arms akimbo, head cocked to one side.  Not wanting to disturb his thoughts, Rogue quietly placed the food on the small table and turned.  Still, he didn't acknowledge her.

            Her body ached.  For years they'd spent their time dancing around one another, clashing into one another, pushing one another away again.  Every single moment of their acquaintance had been passionate, whether in love or anger or bitterness, it didn't matter – their relationship had been nothing if not emotionally torrid.  But now, it hardly seemed fair that she should be able to touch without being afraid, and that he should back down and keep her at arm's length.  And it wasn't even simply that.  It was that he had changed.  There was no passion left in him.  And for a man who had constantly exuded sexuality ever since she'd known him, it was somewhat disconcerting.

            Her body ached.

            For the first time she'd been so sure about the meaning of them, and he wouldn't allow her to express it.

            Still, Rogue had never been one to give in without a fight.  Her wants, her needs, too long suppressed, had made her bold, impetuous, and moreover, selfish.  Without a further thought she crept up behind him and slid her arms around his waist, nuzzling against the back of his neck affectionately.

            "Whatcha doin', swamp rat?" she asked him.

            "Thinkin'," he replied absently.  There was something in his tone that made her look up and over his shoulder.  Spread out at the end of the bed were the four Queen cards.  Red, black, red, black.  Queens, garbed alternately in their variegated finery of geometric, outrageous colour; plump as if they had feasted on fresh bloody flesh; eyes tranquil, impassive; the spindly stems of make-believe flowers clutched like swords in their hands.  Neither looking at the other.  Rogue shuddered involuntarily.

            "Remy…?"

            "There's gonna be four murders, Roguey," he stated, cutting her off.

            "How d' you know?" she whispered.

            "They found a tarot card wit' de body.  One o' de Queen cards.  One outta four, chere, jus' like in my pack."

            "Ah know.  They're all talkin' about the 'Tarot Card Killer' outside.  It scares me, Remy.  It seems so…so strange." She paused, looking down at the cards again. "But your cards are different.  They ain't the same as the tarot."

            "Our friend Eileen Harsaw t'inks otherwise," Remy replied grimly.

            "Eileen?  She was here?"

            "Yeah, came jus' a few minutes ago, while you were out." He appraised the cards again, chewing his bottom lip. "Rogue?  D'you happen t' know what de other three suits o' de tarot are?  Apart from de Pentacles, dat is?"

            She frowned, gazing up at his profile in consternation.  Why was he so bothered about this?

            "Ah dunno…Swords, Cups…an' Wands, ah think.  But ah ain't never been into that stuff, sugah.  Ah'm probably not the best person t' ask."

            "Hmph," he frowned. "Where de hell are Sage an' Bishop when you need 'em?"

            He was barely listening to her.  Her body ached.  Her patience broke.  She couldn't help but lose her temper.  With a sudden strength that had once come so easily to her, she pulled him round to face her, away from those horrible, horrible cards.

            "Remy, stop thinkin' about this goddamn awful murder, will yah?  Ah know Eileen suspects yah, an' it's botherin' yah, but ah _know_ you didn't do it, that you just _couldn't_ do it, so you got nothin' t' prove, okay?  Ah know you couldn't have done it, because…"

            She stopped, unbidden; he stared at her quizzically.

            "Because…?"

            "Shh.  It don't matter anymore," she murmured, nestling her face into his shoulder. "We got each other; none of anythin' else matters anymore."

            She wanted them both to feel it; for both of them to feel the thing they had somehow unaccountably lost upon the way.  She no longer wanted these furtive touches, these stolen caresses, these lies made in the dark, in the slumberous hours near sleep or the torpid inaction of drunkenness.  What she wanted was brutal and simple, brave and brazen connection.   For waking skin to touch waking skin, in terms as absolute and explicit as that burst of birdsong at dawn, the sighs of some lovelorn lover, or the immutable tick-tick-ticking of a clock.

            With feverish fingers she plucked the shirt from his belt; he looked down at her, not questioning the action, nor even the reason – just simply his response, and her response; an interplay of responses, each more combustible than the one that went before it, like a trail of gunpowder leading towards its inevitable and explosive conclusion.  Her fingers were not shy but curious as they climbed the taut contours of his stomach and chest; it had been such a long, long time, you see.  A lost art, perhaps, except that her hands were as artful and disarming as they were always intended to be.  She watched him watch her feel him; _this_ was what she wanted.  The unmistakable language of the eyes, where she could see that she disarmed him the way he used to disarm her; where she could see that she pleased him.  For the first time in weeks she saw the interest, the lust, the passion kindle in his eyes.  Her breath quivered with expectation.  Imperturbable as always, his breath simply misted the eager softness of her lips.

            _Don't say no to me, you can't say no to me, I won't see you denied, say nothing._

            Until she reached the scar that Vargas had marked him with, and traced it with the lightest of fingers.  _Then he drew back quickly, wincing, eyes inexplicably drained of all expression._

            "Remy?" She clenched her hands, held her fingers tight in her palms, not knowing why.  The feel of him still tingled on her fingertips.  It seemed imperative to her that she did not let go of it.

            "Not now, chere," he muttered, hand to his heart.

            "Does it…does it hurt?" she asked.  It took a moment for him to realise that she was talking about the scar on his chest.

            "_Non.  Non, not that." He turned, suddenly making for the door.  Her stomach lurched._

            "Where are you goin'?"

            "Need some fresh air," he replied, not looking at her. "I need t' take a walk."

            He pulled the door open.

            "Ah'm sorry," she called.

            "S'okay, chere. It wasn't de scar dat hurt.  It's…it's just me, okay?  Jus' me."

            He left.  What he didn't know was that she had meant she was sorry for disappointing him by not letting him die.

            Anna Raven turned, and slowly picked up the Queen cards that still rested, like whores, upon the bed.  Anna Raven calmly put them in order, and placed them at the bottom of the pack.  Then she sat, and ate lunch; every so often she'd glance outside the window, waiting, waiting for something she did not know, because Anna Raven didn't really know who Anna Raven really was.

            All that Anna Raven recalled was this – that she'd once had a father and that her father had hurt her.  That she'd learnt how to use a gun.  That she was supposed to be sweet on a boy named Cody Robbins, not a man named Remy LeBeau.  Because – she reasoned calmly to herself – if she _was_ so hung up on this Remy LeBeau guy, she would've ripped up all those cards and flushed them down the toilet.  Someone else was hung up on Remy LeBeau, and that someone else could fly at sonic speed, pick up a truck with one hand, and – worst of all – leech off other people's souls.  And Anna Raven didn't have any of those powers, did she?

            _No, no, no, Anna thought to herself angrily.  __Cody's just a boy, and ah, ah'm a woman.  And ah love Remy LeBeau.  Ah love him so bad it's hurtin' me._

            There was pang in her chest, right where her heart was.  She moaned softly, putting her hand – the hand that still tingled with the feel of him – against her left breast.  The ache dulled, but it did not subside.  That was how much her love hurt.  Heavy, constant.  Like some inescapable load.

            _What's the matter with me, am ah goin' crazy?_

            The fish shifting underneath her skull were quiet.

            Curling up into a ball, Anna and Rogue both wept together.

******************************************************************

            Remy had decided, long before he'd left the room – long before Rogue had even returned, in fact – that he was going to take a walk in the woods that separated the motel from the bar.  The sun had already been out for half a day now; it had travelled to that midway point in its course when its heat is most unbearable.  Insolent, insufferable heat!  Remy felt the sun on his skin as if it stood right beside him, dogging him everywhere he went with an intolerable intimacy.  That it should be at its furthest point high in the sky was something of a mockery to him.  He was glad for the shade of the trees.  He was not so glad to see that the cops and crime scene investigators were still swarming round the cordoned off area where Lizzie Brown had first met her brutal end.

            The wood was not a dense wood.  If the murder had occurred in broad daylight, most likely someone in the small town would have seen it.  Just beyond its outskirts lay the bar.  He could see why Lizzie would have cut across through the trees to get to the motel.  It made sense.  It wasn't far to go.  The trees weren't daunting.  As far as he could tell, it was the murderer who'd been taking the risk.  Anyone could've come out of the bar and seen him commit the crime.

            Like Remy for instance – if he'd been sober.

            He put that thought away immediately.

            A man had seen him, standing on the fringes of the crime scene, and was now approaching him.  It was too late for Remy to slink away, so he just stood there.  The man was youngish – probably about Remy's age – rather plain-looking, with thick, horn-rimmed glasses.  It was the kind of look Remy had thought out of fashion for the past four decades or so.

            "You're Remy LeBeau," the man stated, when he was near enough on the other side of the police cordon to speak to him.

            "An' you might be?" Remy replied disdainfully.

            "Dom Jones, CSI," the man answered evenly.

            "I see.  So you're friends wit' 'Eileen'?"

            "She's my boss."

            "An' I s'ppose she's been tellin' you stories 'bout my guilt, right?"

            "It's a well-known fact that the murderer often returns to the crime scene," the other replied stoutly.

            Remy snorted. "Gimme a break," he scoffed.

            "I know," Jones returned levelly. "It isn't evidence.  Not like your shirt, for instance.  We recovered it from the laundry this morning.  And in case you're thinking that you washed all the evidence off, we still have ways of finding out.  Luminol, for instance.  It can detect blood even when it's been washed off.  Makes the stuff glow in the dark, bright as daylight."

            Remy stared at the man, disbelieving.  This Jones – whatever his first name was, Remy couldn't even remember now – was actually threatening him?  He looked like the kind of guy who could walk through life invisible.  No one on the street would pay him a second glance.  He was the very antithesis of Remy, in fact.  In almost every way.  And he had the balls to _threaten him?_

            "I don't have anyt'ing t' hide," he growled.

            "We'll see." Jones' smile was sly, lop-sided; it didn't even look like it belonged on his face at all. "And while you're here, there's a question I'd like to ask you.  You were in the bar the night of the murder, right?  We spoke to the bartender, and he said that you mentioned something strange not long before you left."

            "I was drunk," Remy answered dryly. "I prob'ly said a lotta t'ings dat were strange, _homme."_

            "Probably.  But the bartender said you asked your girlfriend a question.  Something like, was she your Queen of Hearts or Queen of Diamonds?  Pretty strange question ask, don't you think?  Especially considering the amount of 'Queens' we're seeing round this parts right now."

            Remy gazed at the man narrowly.  Of course he remembered asking the question.  He'd been asking it to himself on and off for the past couple of weeks, in one way or another.

            "There was a song playin' dat night," he rejoined, after a moment. "'Desperado'. De song…no, de words…dey were catchy, y' know?  Dey kinda made sense."

            Jones stared at him blankly.

            "_Don't you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy, she'll beat you if she's able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet." He paused, his mouth lifting into a grin of self-deprecation. "Some people call me Gambit, 'cos I always win each game I play, no matter what.  But wit' my woman, seems I drew a card an' I don't have a clue how t' play it, b'cause I ain't even sure what it is yet.  Game's on hold until she makes her move.  Or until I can figure out de truth myself."_

            Jones' face was silent, watchful.  He seemed to be weighing up Remy's words carefully in his mind, as though they meant something more than what they entailed on the surface.  He seemed almost touched.

            "She hurt you," he stated softly.

            "Women do dat sometimes," he replied, passing the man one of his old, teethy grins. "But o' course, you wouldn' know anyt'ing 'bout dat, would yah, _branleur?"_

            Jones glared at him.

            "Sorry," Remy continued jovially. "But I ain't got not'ing t' do wit' dose hocus-pocus tarot cards – dis Cajun's too simple in his tastes for pretty cards like dat.  Only upmarket t'ings he likes are fine wine an' fine women.  Tarot though – evil an' fortune-tellin', _mon ami_.  Evil an' fortune-tellin', jus' like dis goddamn murderer's mind."

            He walked off, a grimace on his face, a swagger in his step.

            All Jones could do was stare after him, biting viciously into his lower lip.

            An hour or so later, and Remy returned, a small smile on his face.

            "Where've you been?" Rogue asked him.  Her face was white, but all about her eyes were red.  He knew it was heartless of him, but he was in such a pleasant mood that he decided to ignore it.

            "Nowhere in particular," he answered with a short smile.

            "Y' look happy," she remarked.  Her tone was soft, but there was a querying note to her voice, as though his smile were a miracle.

            "Not'ing like fresh air, _mon coeur_," he grinned.  He didn't know why he was feeling like this.  Not happy, not exuberant, not energetic, just somehow released.  Free.  Liberated.  He'd forgotten the four Queens that he'd left lying on the end of his bed.  He'd forgotten the pain in his heart.  He'd forgotten how he felt so dislocated from the world and everything in it.  He simply felt like the most ignorant, most blissful of somnambulists.

            And Rogue smiled.  She actually smiled, and it was like the first time he'd ever seen her smile.

            An hour later they sat on the bed together, watching TV and munching on chips, huddled together comfortably for all the world like little children staying up too late to watch their favourite program.

            And that was when the knocking had come, and what the fortune-teller had predicted finally came true.

            Victim #2 – a local woman named Dottie MacKenzie, 54 years of age, a widow and a grandmother eight times over.  In medieval England – or indeed during the infamous trials at Salem – she would've been the first that any sane, upstanding citizen would have marked out as being a witch.  She had lived a thrifty, hermetic life on the edge of town, like bread sealed in tupperware and gone stale.  People said that she had never got over the death of her husband of twenty-six years; whenever the locals saw her, she was always dressed in black – the fact that she was in mourning simply seemed to enhance the witch-like aura that she exuded.  Time and seclusion had lent her bitterness; bitterness had led to a penchant for the malicious slander of neighbours, bigotry against blacks, Jews, trailer trash and mutants, and a puritanical priggishness that extended even to her own family members.

            She had been found nude and spread-eagled, raped (necrophilically) just like Lizzie Brown, and quite dead, of course; her wrinkled, defiled body had been found lying in a grass verge just off one of the lesser-used town roads, and had scared a couple of children going for a piss in the bushes.

            Dead approximately 3-4 hours, Dottie had been strangled, the air squeezed out of her so viciously that it was as if her attacker thought that the air in her body was a poison to be expelled from her forever.  Pity that her life had to go with it.  Up into the sky it had fled, like a helium balloon.  The marks about her neck were a dark and angry purple.

            The _Queen of Swords had lain, like a last elegant eulogy, underneath her crumpled left hand._

            "There must be two killers at work here," one of the investigators said, shaking his head sadly as a father would shake his head at the misdemeanours of his wayward son. "His MO isn't the same as with the first vic.  Serial killers don't change their MO, not as drastically as this."

            "This guy ain't a serial killer yet," returned the officer in charge, chewing on his gum as if he'd never stopped since the last murder. "We only have two vics."

            "All due respect, sergeant, but this killer isn't going to stop here," A CSI said. "The profiling said the bastard's gonna carry on doing it, and looking at the state of these women… he's not gonna be able t' stop till his 'urge' peters out, the sick son of a bitch."

            "But ritualistic serial killers don't kill one broad with a knife and then strangle another one," another cop persisted from the sidelines. "Not unless he has an element of the previous killing in the second.  Okay, if the guy strangled the old woman, _then took a knife to her throat, that'd clinch it – then it'd be the same motherfucker all right.  But this…"_

            "You're all wrong," Eileen Harsaw spoke up.  Behind her shades her cool blue eyes were on the staring face of Dottie MacKenzie. "The killer's MO isn't in the method of his killings.  It's in the tarot cards that he leaves behind.  The ritual is in the tarot."

            "What, in those hocus-pocus cards?" the officer in charge exclaimed dubiously.

            "The killer isn't just telling us what kind of women he's targeting," Eileen continued gravely. "He's telling us exactly_ how _he's going to kill them."

            "How?" Jones asked from close beside her.  Two bulbous eyes were reflected in her sunglasses twice over as he stared at her in silent consternation.

            "You're the expert, not me, Jones," she returned wryly. "Look – each suit of the Tarot represents one of the elements.  The Pentacles represents earth for instance – Lizzie Brown was found with a piece of earth in her mouth.  The Swords, however, represents air – and now we have Dottie MacKenzie, strangled; the air effectively taken out of her."

            "Which means we're left with?" the police sergeant spoke expectantly.

            Eileen's mouth twisted.

            "Death by fire and water."

***************************************************

            Later, in the dark, Remy lay there reminded of lavender.

            He wondered, even now, why they shared the same bed, finding his answer in the once-thought of having warm arms about him.  Sometimes the sweetest moment is simply in the embrace, that curious impasse, that motionless fulfilment of all that bears the name of 'love'.  But they had not held another like that in a painfully long while.  She was his Galatea, arms as smooth and cool and white as milky marble.  He, Pygmalion, was bound to worship but no more.  To touch her sent the iciest, most agonising of tremors through his heart.  To touch her was to remain forever unquenched. 

            Rogue's fingers were wandering like piggies going to town.  Her back was pressed against the length of his left arm, too close, too intimate for what he knew she was going to do.  Her breath was light yet laboured.  It quivered in the night some silver bell ringing: 'I love you, I need you, why won't you hold me?'

            Pure desolation.

            He lay quite silent, quite still and listened.  Pretending to be asleep.  Torturing himself and loving it with every passing moment.

            Her breath quickened.

            A drop of blood slid across his chest.

            He sat up abruptly, switching on the light.  She started like a deer under headlights, shifting upwards against the headboard; and he saw, momentarily, that her fingers were now clasping the duvet to her bosom.

            "Remy?" she asked.  Her voice was still trembling as though her breath and her voice were one and the same.  How strange the sound.

            "Not'ing," he replied, sliding out of bed.  The clarity of his voice betrayed his sleeplessness to her.  Galatea's cheeks now blazed.

            He, nevertheless, strode into the bathroom, tugged at the light, locked the door and stood with his back against it.  Vargas' scar was bleeding.  Two drops of blood had formed like tears on the fringes of the fleshy pink scar tissue, only to streak downward silently.

            Blood, blood dripping, one, two, over still-warm flesh…

            "Merde," he muttered darkly. "M'sieu Bête, I thought you'd healed dis."

            Blood on his fingers, bright and fresh as her crimson cheeks.

            Old wounds are re-opening.  He buckles over and staunches what he can with reams of snow-white tissue paper.

*****************************************************************

[1] In the righteous Gambit #16

[2] Gambit #6


	4. Stalemates

**. IV .**

            Eileen Harsaw stood in the doorway, one arm outstretched and resting against the frame.  There was something different in her expression – it was no longer hard, no longer pretentious.  Her face had blossomed overnight, not in the way that young girls' faces bloom into womanhood, but in the way that one wakes to a new day with joy in one's heart, without reason or rhyme other than that the joy is there.  Eileen Harsaw was smiling, and for the first time Remy realised how beautiful she really was.

            "I t'ought you CSI's didn' have much to smile about," he quipped, refusing to move out of her way and let her in.

            "There's something for us to smile about when a case opens wide open," she replied smoothly. "And when one's …ah – doubts – shall we say, are proved right."

            "Meanin'?"

            "Meaning, will you let me in?"

            He did so, but only because her face rather than her words were intriguing him.  Once again she sat in what was fast becoming her favourite chair.

            "Anna out again?" she asked.

            "What does it look like?  An' why d'you keep on callin' her dat?"

            "I don't know," she shrugged. "I suppose it suits her.  Anna.  Short.  Sweet.  It's also a palindrome.  Goes both ways, backwards or forwards.  Anna; Anna.  See?"

            Remy passed her an odd look.  For one thing he wasn't used to hearing this ex-villain sounding so upbeat.  For another, her words had somehow both bewildered and enlightened him.

            "An' why exactly are you here?" he asked, finally, annoyed.  He didn't particularly want to hear about palindomes or whatever the hell they were called.

            "I suppose you heard about the second killing?" she asked him coolly.

            "Is dat a t'ing t' smile 'bout?" he asked, scowling.  Last night, when the news had come to him through Chase, he'd automatically felt responsible for the old woman's death.  Rogue had tried to reason with him, saying that none of it was his fault; he, on the other hand, had figured he should have been able to stop it, because he knew something about cards.  Rogue had, obviously, told him it was all ridiculous.  Then they'd argued about it, and had gone to bed without speaking to one another.  What had happened after that had just made things ten times worse, in a peculiar, surreal sort of way.

            He thought of Rogue's quick, light breathing; swallowing, he pushed the thought away, suddenly embarrassed.

            "It's both a curse and a blessing," Eileen was answering his sarcastic question. "It's a curse because – well, the reason's obvious, I suppose.  And it's a blessing because we get a more definitive look into the mind of the killer."

            "Oh really?" Remy crossed his arms and looked down on her, one eyebrow arched. "An' why are you suddenly lettin' me in on all dis?  Yesterday I was your prime suspect, or was dat all jus' some sort o' fancy set-up?"

            Eileen looked up at him, fully returning his caustic glance.

            "You might be happy t' know, Mr. LeBeau, that we checked out your relationship to Lizzie Brown and found nothing.  Same with Dorothy MacKenzie.  And your shirt came back with negative results.  The blood wasn't Lizzie Brown's.  It was yours." She narrowed her eyes at him. "A small, localised bloodstain.  Have you cut yourself recently?"

            Speechlessly, Remy lifted up his shirt, baring Vargas' scar to her.  For a moment, Eileen stared at the wound without speaking; then she sat back again, her expression thoughtful.

            "Fascinating," she murmured in an exact replica of what Hank would have said. "An old wound that still bleeds – I've never come across that before.  Ever heard of stigmata?  They say it's a psychological manifestation of Christ's wounds on the crucifix, as if the person who has the stigmata takes on the suffering of the God they love."

            "Dat a fact?" he replied, eyebrow raised.  Religious debates were hardly to his taste, and he sincerely doubted that he was taking on the suffering of a God who had infringed upon his life only on those odd occasions when he had been dragged to church.

            "That's a pretty nasty injury," she continued meditatively. "And you survived it?"

            "Chere, I'm an X-Man," he returned; the bitter irony in his voice was not lost on her. "_You_ should know dat we always live to fight another day."

            "You sound as if you wish you hadn't," she mused.

            He looked away.  She wondered at the way his eyes seemed to glow of their own volition, when stimulated by emotion or stress.  Obviously he didn't want to talk about it.  She decided to drop it.  It interested her little what the X-Men got up to nowadays, much less their personal lives.  What interested her was the wound.

            "Do you know why it bleeds?" she asked instead.

            "You de scientist, chere.  You're de one who should know."

            "Was it the wound that took away your powers?"

            "Not as such, though it may be one o' de reasons." He wasn't about to explain the fiasco with Khan and his intergalactic invading army to her.

            "So does Anna have the same wound too?  Does hers bleed as well?"

            He glowered at her, both in irritation and uneasiness at her questions.

            "Look, if you don't have a reason in comin' here, den I'd really appreciate it if you'd leave me alone.  I got other t'ings to be t'inkin' about right now."

            "Such as?" Her eyes had drifted to bed.  At the end the Queen of Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts and Spades had been laid out in a row. "I see you've been working on our little puzzle."

            He scowled at her. "I thought maybe I could do somet'ing about it," he admitted quietly.

            Eileen got up, and wordlessly removed the Queen of Spades and Clubs from the row. "These two have already been eliminated," she said clinically. "Queen of Spades/Pentacles, and Queen of Clubs/Swords.  That leaves Hearts/Cups and Diamonds/Wands."

            "Hearts an' Cups, eh?" he half joked. "I don' see de connection."

            "In the tarot, the suit of Cups is linked to human emotions," she replied dryly. "Hence, Hearts." She turned to him. "I finally worked out the pattern of the killings.  Each suit also represents an element.  Earth to Pentacles, air to Swords, water to Hearts, fire to Wands.  That signifies his method of killing.  And I also know who he's going to kill next – symbolically at least.  In the tarot, the cards are always packed in a certain order.  First Wands, then Cups, then Swords, and then Pentacles."

            "Pentacles, Swords…De killer's workin' backwards," Remy murmured, stroking the stubble on his chin.

            "Which means Hearts is next," Eileen retorted grimly.  She threw the two cards back on the bed. "I've had the police stake out all bodies of water in a ten-mile radius.  If we're lucky, we should be able to catch the killer before he attacks again."

            "You t'ink he's gonna fall for dat?  Dis be a small town, chere.  De guy's obviously a local.  He knows his victim's personalities as dey relate to de tarot.   Word spreads fast round here. He probably knows how your li'l operation is workin' already."

            "And what do you suggest we do?" she frowned at him. "Unless you go and pull one of your insane X-Men stunts."

            "I'm on sabbatical," he replied, glancing at her shrewdly. "Unless, o' course, dat was your sole reason for comin' here.  Could you askin' for my help, 'Eileen'?"

            "I'm only asking for you to keep your eyes peeled, Remy," she sniffed. "I'm sure a person of your – uh – considerable skill would be useful to the investigation."

            "I'm flattered," he answered dryly. "But dere's still too many questions t' be asked 'bout dis killer.  Like why he's targetin' women.  An' why he's workin' backwards.  An' what he's tryin' t' tell us."

            "All irrelevant," she returned. "What matters is finding the perp.  And as it happens, I think we have a pretty good chance now of catching the bastard."

            "I hope so," Remy muttered darkly.

            She suddenly sighed.

            "Well, I guess I shouldn't take up anymore of your 'quality time'.  Just remember what I said, okay?"

            "Sure thing.  Eyes peeled."

            She stopped when she got to the door.

            "Oh and Remy?" she began, turning and looked over her shoulder at him.

            "_Quoi?"_

            "Take care of yourself, okay?  Not just as regards to the bleeding.  I'm not sure what the reason is, but the electrical currents inside your body are behaving rather strangely.  Maybe it's part of the reason why you lost your powers, or vice versa.  It's almost like a part of you is switched off.  Or in stasis.  Or…"

            "Not even there at all?" he finished.

            "I wouldn't go so far as to say that…" she faltered off, then shook her head. "Just take care of yourself, okay?"

            "I will."

            _I knew it, he thought, when she'd left. __A part o' me did__ cross over an' die dat day in Madripoor._

Knowing the truth didn't make him feel any better.

*********************************************************************

            When Rogue returned, she was carrying something rather strange in her hands.  The gun was clutched between her fingers like a totem pole from a foreign clan that bore no manner of relation to the person that now held it.

            "All the women in town are gettin' scared," she explained, when Remy had simply stood there and gaped at her. "There's barely a body in sight out a' doors.  But then ah met this really nice girl, Annie Walters is her name, she works at the local ammo store, y'know?  She said ah oughta have somethin' t' protect mahself with, so ah said okay, it made sense, don't wanna get caught like those other poor women did, may their souls rest in peace."

            All the while she was talking she'd sat down on the edge of bed and was very calmly loading bullets into the chamber.  Remy had looked at her, trying to get a grasp on what she was saying.  She had been talking so strangely – her accent was so thick and her words so clipped that he could barely register what she had said.

            "Rogue," he began at last, when he'd finally gathered his wits. "Why de hell did you buy a gun?  You don't need it.  You never have.  You're an X-Man, for God's sake.  You can protect yourself.  I mean, they don't call you the Rogue for not'ing, right?  'Sides, even if you did get in trouble, you got me to protect you, _n'est-ce-pas_?"

            She looked up at him in feigned astonishment. "Do ah?  Do ah really, Remy?  S'funny – you haven' seemed that bothered 'bout the way ah've been feelin' recently, have you." She looked down again, continuing to load bullets. "Y'know, sometimes ah think ah barely know you anymore, Remy.  You've changed, an' y' won't talk t' meh 'bout it.  Why're you doin' this t' meh, Remy?  Why're you hurtin' meh so much?"

            Her hands were shaking as finished loading the gun.  She'd left the box of ammunition lying precariously on the edge of the bed; she was quivering so much that suddenly it slid over the end and crashed onto the floor noisily.  She started and cried out like a cat; bullets rolled this way and that in a myriad of brassy reflected light.  For a moment he thought she would bend over and pick them up, but instead she dropped her head into her hands and began to tremble so hard he almost fancied she'd shatter into a million pieces.

            "What's happenin' t' meh?" she suddenly wailed into her hands. "Why can't ah think straight?  Am ah goin' crazy?"

            It was one of those rare, rare moments, when Rogue was vulnerable and showed it.  Some part of him was moved into that old familiar reaction, where he would put his arms round her, and try to console her.  So often she'd only pushed him away, making her vulnerability all the more unbearable to him.  But this time she did not push him away.  Instead she clung to him as if she would never let go, her trembling racking his body so that, for the first time, it was _he_ who felt guilty, not her.  Paradoxically, he felt guilty for all the things that she'd once felt so guilty about – for being unable to touch her, for being unable to give her what she wanted, for being unable to fully trust her.  Despite everything he'd lost to her, he could not help but felt ashamed for suddenly feeling so cold.

            "You ain't goin' crazy, chere," he tried to comfort her. "You ain't."

            "You don't understand!" she cried. "For so long ah've lived mah life bein' both Rogue and dozens of other people, all at the same time, all in one go.  An' God knows that was hard enough.  But now ah feel like there's two of _me inside mah head, and ah don't know which one's the real me and which one isn't!  Ah'm scared, Remy, an' ah ain't just scared of this crazy killer that's out there, ah'm scared of me!  Sometimes ah just feel like…like…"_

            She stopped abruptly, shuddering in his arms, and suddenly he half understood what the gun was for.  His heart hurt.

            "Anna Raven…is she _you_?" he asked impulsively.

            "Ah don't know," she whimpered. "Maybe she was, once.  Ever since we got here, she's been comin' at me like some mem'ry ah'd tossed away an' buried over.  Maybe she's the me that ah always wanted to be, but could never become.  Maybe she's just a wish, a fairytale, a dream, a fantasy."

            She drew away from him, her moist, green eyes staring timorously into his own.

            "She scares me, Remy.  She scares me so much.  An' the more you push me away, the more she won't let me go.  Ah'm so confused, Remy.  She's just a ghost.  Ah don't want her.  Ah want _you_."

            "Chere, right now you know I can't…"

            "Can't what?  Tell me you love me?" Tears were sliding out of her eyes freely now. "It was so easy for you to tell me on the astral plane, when you were leavin' me behind.  It was only because you were leavin' that ah knew, ah just _knew that ah'd never be able t' let you go again.  Ah finally got it into mah stupid head what the two of us _meant_.  An' now you're denyin' us, Remy, an' it's as though we never meant anythin' in the first place!"_

            Despite everything she was sure, so damn well certain of their love that he was both envious and frustrated with her.  He felt it again, that same recurring pang in his heart, so violent, so urgent that the breath was forced out of him.

            "Rogue," he began, trying to be patient, trying to wrestle against the ache in his chest. "What happened on the astral plane changed us.  Not just me, chere, but de both of us.  We've_ changed_…"

            "So what?!" she burst out; two tears were trickling, one, two, across each cheek. "Rogue still loves you, Anna still loves you!  _We both love you_!"

            The words seemed to shock the both of them.  Rogue halted, horror on her face, shaking, shaking as though her whole world was crumbling down beneath her; her eyes widened so that the green fire in them seemed to dim and burn, dim and burn…  And he could only stare at her, aghast, as her words stabbed into the core of him in all their infinite strangeness.

            For the first time, her love was unconditional.

            And it killed him almost as much as the time when it had not been.

            Now she was staring at him, mouth opened into a small, disbelieving O. "Oh mah Lord," she whispered.  Was it a dream?  Was it a dream that he saw the death, the terror inside him reflected in those emerald eyes? "Ohmigod, Remy, you're _bleedin'!"_

            He looked down, dazed.  The single red rose was forming on his T-shirt, splaying outward, unfolding, unfurling its petals so that he was both entranced and confused.  It couldn't have been blood, could it?  It was too beautiful.

            "Remy!" she was calling from far away. "Remy, what's happenin'?! What should ah do!  Oh please God, no!"

            He did not even remember keeling over and into her arms.

            When next he regained consciousness he was lying on the bed, his head cradled in her arms against her bosom.  It could have been seconds, minutes or days since he'd blacked out.  He could still feel the blood on his chest, wet and sticky, relegating the length of his unconsciousness to seconds or minutes.  The metallic stench of blood hung in the air.

            "_Mon amour, suivez-moi dans le lumière,[1]" he muttered thickly, feeling her lips on his forehead.  He had the odd, fleeting impression of being back in his old life._

            "Remy?" her breath quivered in his hair. "Remy, chere?  What did you just say?"

            He did not reply.  The swimming sensation of contentment was fading away from him fast.  He could not even remember what it was he had said.  It seemed, for the second time, that she had drawn him away from the light and back into reality.  He groaned, shifting.  The pain in his chest had gone.  The dampness on his shirt was cold.  Vargas' wound had stopped bleeding.

            "Remy, mah God, you're alive," she half-sobbed, hiccuping, holding him tight against her.  There was time when such a position would have made him the happiest man alive.  Now he just felt bewildered and confused.  Through the softness of her blouse he could feel the sharpness of one nipple press against his cheek.  It reminded him abstractly of that sultry, sensuous, arousing odour of lavender-scented hair, a memory from a stolen night so long ago.

            "Am I?" he murmured hoarsely. "Am I alive?"

            He sat up slowly, breaking free from her embrace.  Had he been dreaming?  However long he had been unconscious, it had felt like that free-floating, free-falling space in between sleep and wakefulness, when the one is neither here nor there, when one could leave one's body far, far behind.  He still felt as light as a feather, disconnected from her arms, from her body, from the world.

            Rogue was behind him, her hands on his back.  It was only their warmth that grounded him in some sort of reality.

            "Remy, what happened?" she asked uncertainly. "What's happenin' t' you?  Tell me, sugah.  Please tell me."

            "Vargas' scar…" he began, then stopped.  He didn't understand.  He simply didn't understand any of it.  How could he explain?

            Slowly Rogue moved to kneel beside him. "Ah thought Hank had healed that scar," she stated quietly.

            "Me too," he replied groggily, looking down into his upturned palms as if they could provide an answer. "But obviously he ain't.  Somet'ing weird is happenin' t' me, Rogue, an' I don't have a clue why.  All I know is it hurts.  It hurts so bad…" His voice wavered to a stop, and she cupped his face in her hands, seeing the sadness in his eyes.

            "Let me take your pain away, Remy," she begged him softly. "Please let me take it all away."

            This was her atonement, offered freely to him. He could not answer.  Why was she so beautiful, why did she make him want to love her?  She, obliviously optimistic and obstinate to the last, mistook his expression for assent. Leaning forwards, she kissed him; her tongue, with coy, brave shyness, brushing against his as if to ask permission to love him.  He did not know why he reached out for her, nor why he responded.  Perhaps it was the light pressure of her fingers as they now rested in his hair; perhaps it was simply because he missed the taste of her.  Perhaps because he loved her, only it hurt too damn much, right there, inside the scar.  Or maybe it was because he could feel the way her body ached, and she'd somehow tricked him into wanting her.

            On a bed, in some unnamed town, two shadows of their former selves kissed, each aware that the other was the shadow of one of the one they kissed.

            "Ah wantcha to make love to me," she whispered against his mouth, seductive as the serpent. "Ah want us t' make believe everythin' is the way it was before all this."

            She was tricking him!  He could feel her body aching so much that he thought the aching was all his!  How could he resist her?  How could he repel her when she made him ache so much?

            "Like Anna is make-believe?" he whispered back; accusations made in whispers as if to hide the wounds they dealt each other from the world.  Her eyes burned then dimmed.  For a mad moment he thought he'd killed her.

            Someone knocked at the door, softly, reverently, as if they knew the nature of the singular embrace contained within.  Remy remained silent, thwarted, still caught teetering on the brink of taking and rejecting her.  When the knocking came again, it was louder, impatient; the single moment of decision was shattered.  

            Stalemate.

            Unwilling, he removed his gaze from hers.

            "Door's open," he called, "Come in!"

            No reply.  Rogue had backed off, her hands dropping to her knees, artfully demure.

            "Come in!" he called again, this time with frustration.

            There was a pause; then, from the gap underneath the door, someone pushed a small slip of paper into the room, the sound of it grating into the silence.  Rogue held her breath, suddenly uneasy; Remy simply stared at the paper until it was lying fully on the threshold.  His stomach flipped with an overpowering and instinctive sense of dread.  No footsteps sounded outside the door.  Wordlessly he shifted off of the bed and went to pick up the note.

            It was a small, nondescript rag of notepaper, folded once over, four words written in broken handwriting on the front.  '_Pour vous, La Mort'._

            "What is it?" Rogue asked, seeing the sudden disquiet on Remy's face.

            "It's for me," he replied, quietly.  Slowly he unfolded the page and a card slipped out and onto the floor.  It fell, landing on its back, upturned for all to see.  A tarot card, black on white and frosted blue, the Grim Reaper, reaping souls and –peculiarly – fish.

            _Death._

            "Oh mah Lord…" Rogue muttered into her hands, shocked.  Remy had flung the door open and was looking up and down the corridor to no avail.  Whoever had sent the message was gone.

            "Shit!" he exclaimed, slamming the door shut.

            "Remy, it's a tarot card," Rogue stammered, as he picked it up and stared at it. "Mah God, the _killer was just outside our door!_"  Her face was whiter than he'd ever known it, so that she appeared stonier cold than the statue he'd come to fear she was.  If she had been trembling before, she was trembling harder now.  But he barely noticed.  His mind now was working rabidly.  The note had been addressed to him: _pour vous, La Mort_.  For you, Death.  And the card…The card was a message.  A message he couldn't read, because, after all, there was no Death in the pack of cards Remy carried round with him; there was only the Joker.

            Cursing, Remy grabbed his trenchcoat and threw it on, feeling his pockets for the bike keys.

            "Remy, what're you doin'?" Rogue asked, her voice quivering with fear as she saw the suddenly fierce look on his face.

            "Goin' out," he answered, folding up the tarot card back inside the note and dropping it into his pocket.

            "Where?"

            "The crime lab."

            "What?  Why?  Remy, for God's sake please tell me what's goin' on!"

            "You think I know?" he retorted, turning to look back at her, hand on the door handle. "Rogue, de killer's just sent me a message, God knows why, but he has.  Eileen knows 'bout de tarot – maybe she can decipher it for me."

            "Take me with you," she begged, jumping off the bed and going to him.  Her cheeks were pale as she clutched onto the lapels of his coat with quivering hands. "Please don't leave me here, Remy, please don't leave me alone!"

            "_Non, non, chere, dis is personal," he shook his head stubbornly. "For some reason I'm already tangled up in dis mess, an' I can't get you involved too."_

            "Remy, the killer was here, he was _here_!" she exclaimed helplessly. "Please, ah'm beggin' you, please don't leave me alone again!"

            He looked at her, Galatea, cold and white as marble, his love, his lover, crystallised.

            "He won't hurt you," he said at last.

            "How do you _know_?" she persisted.

            "B'cause it's de Queen o' Hearts he's goin' t' kill next," he replied calmly, collectedly. "An' you ain't de Queen o' Hearts, Rogue."

            Rogue, so fierce, so proud, so certain of the meaning of them, heard his rejection as clear as if he had slapped her in the face.  For the first time in so long, she doubted; she doubted what they shared.  Her hands slipped from his coat in resignation.  The card that she'd given him, that he'd given back to her, that she'd given back to him in the snow[2] – she remembered it well.  Too well.  And now he'd handed that battered and faded card back to her, with all the love and pain and bitterness and regret that came with it.

            "I won't be long," he told her, then turned, brushed past her and left.

            Rogue locked the door, slowly, deliberately, eyes swimming.  Then she slid to the floor and wept.

*****************************************************************

            Annie Walters was not like the woman called Anna Raven, although, when they had met earlier that day, she had admired the brown-haired, green-eyed southern belle, if not for that unusual skunk-stripe in her hair, then certainly for her beauty and – dare she say it – sass.  Anna was everything Annie was not: she was older, and wiser, and in-love, and her body ached in a way that Annie's never would.

            Annie, sixteen, didn't like the ammo store – she was only doing her friend's shift because her friend was in a bad way after catching the flu (in summer?), and Annie was always the type who loved to help others.  Unlike Anna Raven, Annie was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and though she was not meek, she was certainly quiet, and wistful, and prone to daydreaming.  She admired strong women, because she was not particularly feisty or extroverted herself.  She was a new instrument left unplayed; chaste, naive and untouched.  In her free time, she liked to write poetry, or go and volunteer down at the community centre.  She liked to read Dickens, Austen and Hardy to the crabby old grandmothers in the nearest old folks home.

            Imagine being Annie Walters as she closes up for the night, unassuming, unknowing, unthinking; for she is untouched, and in this small town, the darkness of carnal knowledge has not fallen over her eyes.  She is halfway through her task when a man comes, a man who she's seen around town often enough – she isn't stupid, just naive; no one can blame a girl for that, can they? – and he says that he really needs to buy some ammo, he's going hunting tomorrow morning with some friends, can he trouble her to open up again, if it's not too much to ask?  She sees the man is in a dilemma and because she was always the type who loved to help others, she agrees.  The man buys one box of ammunition for his rifle.  He pays, then helps her to lock up.  And, since he owes her one, and since there's the Tarot Card Killer roaming about (he says the name with a kind of derisive amusement), he offers to walk her home and keep her safe.

            Annie is an orphan.  The man knows that she lives with friends, who are on summer vacation somewhere up north.  The man knows this because he's a loose acquaintance of Annie's friends.  He says to her, oh, I know Mr and Mrs So-and-so, they talk about you a lot.  That's the way he ingratiates himself.  When he asks about the cat, who's sick, Annie doesn't find it odd to ask him inside the house so that he can see the cat and have a cup of tea.  When he finishes the cup of tea, he leaves.  Annie neglects to lock the door because it doesn't even occur to her, having been lulled into a false sense of security.  She goes upstairs and runs a bath.  While she is bathing, the man re-enters the house.  The cat looks up, but recognises him and so goes back to sleep.  The man knows Annie baths every night.  He's been watching her, in his spare time.

            When he walks in on her – quietly and calmly, for all the world as if he belongs there – that is when the darkness falls over Annie's eyes.  But it is far too late.  He holds her under the water, and she struggles with all the strength of her newfound knowledge, but it is too little, too late.  Then he drags her wet body into the bedroom, and make-believes he loves her, because he can't really love her, yet he wants to love, even though a part of him is dead.  Which is fitting, because, he realises abstractly, she is dead too.

            When it is over, he rearranges her, as he has done Lizzie and Dottie before.  Lizzie, Dottie, Annie.  He likes the sound of their names together.  That, he thinks, is the only inadvertent joy he gets out of loving them.  Everything else is perfectly planned fantasy.

            He slips the card underneath her left palm, and then the second; but already he is thinking about his next lover, and how she will be _la_ _reine des reines._

            Annie's body, pillaged, will only be found thirty-six hours later.

********************************************************************

            Both Eileen and Dom Jones jumped when Remy came barging into the lab.

            "What the hell are _you_ doing here?!" she seethed, standing up by her workbench in indignation. "You're not even supposed to be able to _get_ in here!"

            "I'm a t'ief," he informed her through clenched teeth, as though it explained everything.  Then he reached into his pocket, and slapped a slip of paper and a card onto the worktop in front of her.  As she looked, all Eileen's previous sense of anger abruptly fell from her.  She stared at the paper, with its short note, and then at the tarot card.  Her cheeks were ashen.  Dom said nothing.

            "De bastard had de nerve t' pass it under my door," Remy said, eyes flashing.

            Carefully Eileen picked up both note and card between her gloved fingers.

            "'For you, Death'," she read quietly.  She looked up at him, questioning. "Why would the killer send _you a message?  And why would he call you 'Death'?"_

            "I was hopin' you might be able to tell me," he answered darkly.

            "Death," Eileen spoke thoughtfully. "Rather ironic, since he's the one who's dealing in it."

            "Then why's callin' _me_ La Mort?" Remy questioned in irritation. "You de one who's read up on de tarot, Eileen. Tell me what dis card means!"

            "Well, the card _is_ called Death," she retorted sarcastically. "What do you think it means?  Death, corruption, decay, end…"

            "But only inasmuch as death is a metaphor, Ms. Harsaw," the bespectacled CSI Jones spoke up from the sidelines.  He blushed when they turned to him. "The Death card is about putrefaction," he explained rather self-consciously. "The old, the corrupt and the decayed… All these things have to undergo a death for the new to be reborn." He pointed to the picture on the card. "The fish that Death is reaping stand for the resurrection of souls.  Fish are an ancient mythological symbol for the reincarnation of soul – from primitive mythologies to modern Christianity."

            "_Mon Dieu…" Remy muttered, half to himself._

            "In its opposite aspect, this card also represents inertia and sleep," Jones continued, warming to the subject. "And some might say sleepwalking as well.  Just like a part of oneself is…"

            "Livin' an' kickin' an' walkin' around like a normal body, while inside a part o' him is dead?" Remy finished off, his gut suddenly churning.  Jones passed him an odd look.

            "Well, I suppose, if you want to put it in _that_ way…" he conceded, after a moment.

            "Shit," Remy hissed.

            "What is it?" Eileen asked, perturbed by the sudden expression of horror and foreboding on his face.  Remy looked away, down at the cloaked figure of _Death_.

            "Dis guy – whoever de bastard is – he knows t'ings about me dat even Rogue don't know." He turned to face her, and his eyes were blazing red. "He _knows me, Eileen.  An' I don't have a clue how or why."_

********************************************************************

[1] 'My love, follow me into the light.'

[2] Uncanny X-Men 349-350.  Wonder where that card is now?

Buh. There goes my brain. And for all you Romy fans out there, our couple will be sorting it out in suitably gory fashion in the next 2 chapters. I think…


	5. Bonds

**. V .**

            Remy sat in the motel room, a cigarette hanging forlornly between his lips.  He hadn't smoked in weeks, and, judging from the expression on Rogue's face, she entirely disapproved of the fact that he was lighting up now.  Either that, or she was still sore about the way he'd rejected her the other afternoon.  He suspected it was both.

            "I told you it weren't goin' t' work," he was telling Eileen with the dull tone of one who was repeating himself for the umpteenth time. "Dis guy, he's too smart.  De cops were wastin' their time stakin' out de rivers.  An' now you got dis missin' girl on your hands.  So what you gonna do now, eh?"

            Eileen was looking out of the window, her jaw tight, her arms crossed against her chest.  For all her height, for all her inner strength, she suddenly looked defeated.  Another missing girl was on her hands – a girl called Annie Walters.  No one had noticed she was missing until she'd failed to turn up at the local old folks home.  She'd been going to read 'Pride and Prejudice' to peevish old women.  Imagine that!

            "We'll interview our suspects, I suppose," she answered after a moment.

            "Suspects?!" Remy stared at her in disdain. "You ain't got none, Eileen, admit it!  No one's seen dis bastard, he's left no traces behind, it's like he don' even exist!  So what you gonna do?  Round up all de men in town and see whether they fit de killer's profile?  Chere, by de time you do dat, he's gonna have killed again, do y' see de rate dis guy is workin' at?"

            "Every two days," Eileen murmured. "That means he's going to kill again tonight.  He can't stop until he's through."

            "Damn straight!" Remy burst. "An' now he's bringin' me into it! Why de fuck is he bringin' me into it!"

            "Because you can understand why," she replied, softly.  He did a double-take, gaping at her.

            "_What?!"_

            "You share something in common – the cards," she retorted gently. "Symbols and weapons." She grimaced, turning to face him. "Like you said, he knows you Remy.  Somehow, he knows you.  Which leads me to believe we have a mutant on our hands."

            "You mean a telepath?" Rogue asked from her seat cross-legged on the bed.

            "Maybe."

            "Den what's de big deal, woman?" Remy spat, stubbing out the cigarette viciously. "Part o' your power is t' feel other people's metahuman abilities!  So snuff out de guy yourself!"

            Eileen's expression clouded. "I gave up using my powers like that when I left the Brotherhood," she replied after a moment; remembering, for the first time in years, the touch of St. John Allerdyce and shuddering. "Using my powers the way you want me to isn't what my job calls for."

            "It didn't stop you using them on us," Rogue pointed out coldly.

            "That's different from going out and deliberately using them on a whole town," Eileen returned evenly.

            "But this is to find a _murderer_," Rogue persisted heatedly.

            "Can you imagine how many men are in this town, Anna?  And you want me to go prying into their private lives, one and all?"

            "Bullshit," Remy sulked, lighting up again. "For an ex-member o' de Brotherhood, you soundin' strangely like ol' Charlie Xavier."

            Eileen actually laughed.

            "Xavier?  His decision not to impinge on the lives of others comes from his own trumped up sense of morality.  And mine…" She trailed off, her eyes shifting to the window again. "Mine comes from the fact that I realised that nothing matters in this life but living – not fighting." She looked round at them again. "I do things the proper way now.  I do my bit in society – I catch the baddies that plague everyday human life, not the lunatic supervillains like Magneto, or the Red Skull, or Apocalypse.  They aren't the real plagues on this planet.  It's the killer that's right out there at this moment that's the villain."

            "So, you gonna find him or not?" Remy asked bluntly, unfazed by her speech.

            "I'm working on it."

            She moved to sit down by the coffee table, picked out the final Queen card from Remy's pack.

            "One victim left, boys and girls," she spoke up wryly. "The _Queen of Wands.  That's Diamonds to all you tarot uninitiated," she half-grinned at Rogue. "The Queen of fire."_

            "An' what does your book say 'bout the _Queen of Wands_?" Remy asked, taking a drag impatiently.

            "Hm." Eileen took out the battered book Jones had given her, _The Book of Thoth.  She felt stupid looking at it, such an arcane tome, and she, the quintessential scientist. "The books says: 'The characteristics of the Queen are adaptability, a persistent energy…kindly and generous, impatient of opposition.  Immense capacity for friendship and love, but only on her own initiative.  Pride.'  And on the negative aspect we have ' can be easily deceived, stupid, obstinate…quick to take offence and harbour revenge without a good cause.'" She snapped the book shut. "Narrows it down a lot, huh?"_

            "It probably could be half the women in town," Rogue said.

            Remy said nothing.  He was looking at the single, upturned card lying on the table, staring back at him with that soft, insidious smile on its lips.  The Queen of Diamonds.  And listening to what Eileen had read, each word had leapt out at him as if the Queen of Diamonds had said it herself.  Suddenly, he understood why the killer was working backwards.  He was working backwards because he was working up to this – to the Queen of Diamonds.  The Queen on her pedestal, crystallised, the thing that Remy could not bear to touch.

            "He knows me," Remy suddenly blurted, aghast with the knowledge of his sudden epiphany.

            "What?" Eileen was staring at him.

            "Merde!" He leaned forwards, burying his face into his hands.  This time, he had a way of stopping the killer, because he knew who the next victim was going to be.  He just didn't know _how _to stop him.

            "Remy?  Are you all right?"

            Normally Rogue would have gone to him, but this time she didn't.  He was glad she didn't.  He couldn't bear for her to put her arms round him.

            "It's okay, chere," he said, looking up and smiling wanly at her.  She didn't believe his smile.  He could tell she didn't.  The girl knew him too well.

            Luckily, anything she could have said was cut off by the shrill beep of Eileen's pager going off.  There was a dread look on her face as she looked at it.

            "They've found the girl," she informed the two of them flatly when she had finished reading the message. "Drowned in her own bath.  Same ritualistic pattern as before." She clipped the machine to her belt again and looked up at Remy coolly. "You were right.  He _was_ cleverer than us.  Now if you don't mind, I have to go and attend to the crime scene."

            She left, slamming the door shut behind her.  Even if they had told her she had not failed, she would never have believed it.

            "Ah should go an' get us some coffee or somethin'," Rogue murmured, when Eileen's heavy footsteps had died away. "There's no point in us mopin'."

            "No," he ordered quickly.  His voice was so hard that she was surprised.

            "What?"

            "You ain't leavin' dis room, y'hear?  'Sides, I don't want no damn coffee!" He stood up, and in a sudden surge of anger, swiped the pack of cards helter-skelter off the table, so that the Queen of Diamonds was lost underneath an avalanche of red and black and white.  Rogue stared at the fallen cards, then back at him, chest heaving, standing there.

            "Remy, what the _hell _is the matter with you?" she demanded.

            "Dere ain't nothin' the matter wit' me, Rogue," he answered irritably, turning away from her.  He plumped himself down in a nearby chair, rubbing the bridge of his nose tentatively.  Without words she walked up beside him and laid her hands on his shoulders – he tensed instinctively at her touch.  He knew how he should feel.  That subtle tremor that every touch of hers used to give him, that pleasurable ache.  The ghost of reciprocation taunted him.  He struggled to feel it, but couldn't.  On his shoulders, her fingers contracted and released, as if his struggle had somehow infected her, as if she too no longer knew how to react.

            "It's to do with me bringin' you back, isn't it," she spoke at last, her tone low, accusing, almost; he felt her words, probing, beneath his skin. "You think ah shoulda left you there on the astral plane.  You wanted t' die, you wanted your redemption, an' ah took it from you.  That's why you hate me, isn't it?"

            "You t'ink you know," he replied sullenly. "You t'ink you understand, but you don't, chere, you _can't_."

            "B'cause you won't let me!" she exclaimed, suddenly frustrated. "B'cause you don't want me to!" He did not answer her.  Desperation took her.  Why wouldn't he tell her?  If he hated her then so be it.  She just wanted to know the truth.  She wanted to know _why.  Of all things, she could not bear to love him and not know the truth.  She released him and circled the chair, kneeling before him and pulling his face round to look at her, staring up beseechingly into his eyes. "Remy, please," she begged. "For God's sake just _tell_ me."_

            "You want t' know de truth?" he asked her. "You want t' know, even if you can't understand?" He paused.  His mouth contorted.  She was too wilful, too stubborn to back away.  They both knew it. "You don't _know_, chere," he continued helplessly, wishing she had said no. "You don't know what it is t' face dat light an' everyt'ing it stands for.  It was so _right_.  Don't you get it?  Nothin' in dis fucked up life o' mine has _ever felt right, Rogue.  An' for once, what _was_ right was starin' me right there in the face, an' I couldn't reach it, I just couldn't reach it because o' you."_

            Tears welled in his eyes.  That hurt her more than anything else he could have said.  To see his despair, his anguish, his torment – they all rent at her heart.  She could feel his tears eat into the core of her.  The pain in her chest suddenly sprang like a flower in bloom.

            "No, Remy, you're wrong, an' you know it," she shook her head wildly, trying to catch his gaze, but he wouldn't look at her. "Ah know you've been hurtin'; don't think ah don't know that for so much of your life you've been in pain.  But the two of us, _we're right, an' we messed up so much before, but now ah know, ah _know_…" She stopped, wincing with the pain; but she cupped his face in her hands and made him look at her. "Please don't say it ain't right, Remy," she pleaded. "You tried so many times t' make me see that we were right, an' ah was so stupid…  It was only when ah was losin' you for good that ah _knew_ we were right, nothin's felt so right in mah life, just like ah know it hasn't in yours.  That's why ah had to hold you back, Remy, not just for me, but for the both of us!"_

            "It was my _time_, Rogue!" he seethed at her, losing his temper, his eyes lifting to hers and glinting moistly in the morning light. "It was the way things were supposed t' end.  Why did you bring me back, chere?  Why'd you have t' do dat t'ing you always do, be so bull-headed an' impetuous, as if nothin' matters in this world but what _you want?!"_

            "That's bullshit, Remy," she exclaimed, shaking her head obstinately, fury suddenly swelling inside her at his words. "You _know_ it ain't true!  If it were your time you wouldn't be standin' here now, with me.  You got a second chance – why can't you be grateful for it?  Why can't you be grateful for what we have?  Why can't you fuckin' well accept that you love me?!"

            "Don't you dare talk t' me 'bout love an' acceptance, Rogue," he seethed, standing up in sudden rage. "After all those years o' grief you gave me, you have no right to accuse me o' cutting you outta _my_ life!"

            "Ah have a right!" she yelled at him, grasping onto his shoulders with an iron grip and pulling him back violently. "Ah have right b'cause ah love you, an' so help me God, what ah did in Madripoor ah woulda done a thousand times over, b'ecause ah know you love me too!  Under all that sulkin', under all that self-pity, you love me, an' you won't say it, 'cos you think ah should suffer the way ah've made you!"

            "You don't get it, do you!" he roared, swivelling and pushing her away roughly.  She staggered a few steps backward, amazed, undone; an odd sense of relish spiked through him, when he saw her hand go to her heart.  It imbibed him with such a sense of cruel exhilaration that suddenly he couldn't even help the words from spilling out. "I can't love you!" he bellowed, both alarmed and excited by the voracity of his admission so that, suddenly, he wanted to laugh deliriously in her face. "I can't love you, because a part o' me's dead, Rogue, b'cause you left a part o' me to die dat day in Madripoor, just like you left a part o' me to die dat day in Antarctica!  I can't love you, 'cos de part o' me dat loves you is dead!"

            He flaunted the words like red flags in front of her, challenging her to fight back, all the while knowing what he was doing to her and hating himself.  This was his _coûp de grâce, his finishing stroke – she stared up at him as though he had utterly annihilated her, and when she moaned he thought for one terrible moment that he had killed her._

            But she was still breathing.  And her eyes, he saw, now sparkled with what he mistook for life but was actually nothing more than saltwater.  He was suddenly, inexplicably filled with horror.  At that moment he would have given anything for her to tell him he was wrong, to fight for him with all the brazen devotion she always had.  To stop his love for her hurting so much inside.  But when she clutched her breast and said nothing, the only thing he could do was turn, and leave.

************************************

            Outside it was humid, more so than before – but the sky had darkened, reflecting his mood.  Dull, flat, slate grey clouds were gathering like a premonition, thick with the promise of rain.  At the corner of the motel, he stood and inflicted his pent up rage upon the dumpster, until his knuckles were raw and his ankles ached with the numbness.

            "Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you _fuck you _LeBeau!!"

            After screaming out the words he suddenly collapsed, entirely purged of all emotion.  He sprawled there, against the wall, flooded in the feather-light, surreal sensation of neither being here nor there.  The feeling perplexed him.  It was the way he had been feeling ever since the morning he'd woken up in that hospital bed with Rogue beside him – the first thing he'd been aware of was the curious, crawling emptiness that came with the loss of his mutant powers; the second thing he'd felt was the bizarre impression of floating, of being utterly dispossessed of everyone and everything.  Now his hands stung and his legs ached.  But the very nature of his present existence was so nebulous, so confused that he couldn't even feel it.  He felt like a man on a rack, stretched out over countless years, skin distended like butter spread too finely over thick bread until only bare molecules were left; molecules oblivious to pain or hate, to love or reason.

            The clouds lurched overhead.  The rain contained within caused them to buckle as if under some tremendous weight.  But those fluffy, frail, ephemeral clouds held on.  They held on.

            He paused, considering.  No: tell a lie.  He _could_ feel something.

            The pain in his heart was as slack as an old worn rubber band.  He wondered at it.  Brooded.  Usually, it was dull but omnipresent, like a cancer taken over his body, indefinable but there.  When Vargas' scar was going to bleed, the pain would increase, tight and stabbing.  But now it was flaccid, like it too had been stretched out over too long a time, or distance.  He touched his chest gingerly.  He felt nothing.  He fancied he'd finally done it.  He fancied he'd finally made Rogue feel all the pain she'd put him through, that the brutal physicality of it had been transferred onto her.

            Now she'd know what it was to love her.

            After Antarctica, things had never been straight between them, not until those last few weeks before she'd left to join Storm's team, and he'd gone on his own (less than merry) way.  The parting hadn't exactly been to his taste, but he'd pushed her absence to the back of his mind, and had, as usual, found his pleasure in other, anonymous women.  Inevitably, when they'd crossed paths once more – she like some brassy little angel in a cheong-sam dress, he on the run from the law, as usual – he'd fallen in-love with her all over again, the way he always did.  (He had no idea why, but whenever she came along and graced him with her outrageous and agonisingly irresistible presence, it always had the effect of sending him into transports of frustrated, maudlin celibacy.  This occasion had, of course, been no different.) Subsequently he'd got framed for murder (what _was_ it with him and murders?); then he'd spent most of his time being tied down, spread-eagled and in his boxers, to some huge alien energy beam.

            It was obvious she'd come to save him – at that singular moment in time when she'd come blazing in to his rescue, all he could think was that he couldn't be dressed more appropriately for her.  And then somehow things had all gone wrong.  Vargas had come.

            He remembered that moment, remembered it because the very essence of it was lodged inside him.  Vargas' sword, impaling them both in some sadistic consummation of both love and death, a marriage of cold steel and warm flesh.  He remembered the way she had screamed out when he could not, her scream replaying along the blade as she pressed against him in some unholy lover's embrace.  The sword, penetrating, impaling, joining them together more intimately than they had ever dreamed possible.  Her heartbeat, irregular, fluttering like a bird, wildly, as if it was _he_ who penetrated _her_; her blood, bleeding into him, his blood, bleeding into her – their blood, mingled.

            Remy jolted, and suddenly he realised it.

            That his scar was hers, and that hers was his.

            That both scars belonged to both of them, and that each was the symbol, the anima, of the other.  Somehow, Vargas' wound had connected them, body and soul; all he had bled he had bled for her.

            The pang in his heart was Rogue, now he couldn't feel her anymore.

            Remy scrambled to his feet and ran.

***********************************

            Rogue was sitting naked in the shower, lifeless as a broken marionette, her skin the pigment of steeped flour, pale as muddied snow but for the runnels of diluted blood that ran down from her scar to her stomach and thighs and gathered round in a pool to swirl, round, round, round, down into the drain.

            He had the fleeting, horrific notion that he had walked back in on Lizzie Brown, but this was far more macabre; for now he walked in on a scene of his own creation – she, the victim and he, her killer.

            All at once he had splashed forwards into the pink water, fallen to his knees alongside her and pulled her limp body into his arms.  He wailed and whimpered. His voice was dismembered from his thoughts, drowned out by the deafening crash of the water.  He neither knew nor heard what it was that he said; he only knew that he implored her, and that she did not answer.

            "Rogue, Rogue, _mon amour_, I'm sorry, please don't leave me, don't leave me…!"

            His hands, trembling, squeezed her clammy, pale cheeks, willing her into life, a flicker of the eyes, a twitch of the mouth, a spasm of the brow.  Her head, unwilling, lolled sideways, puppet-like.  From somewhere deep within a memory resurfaced; his heart swelled, as it had done in his old life – he choked, bursting into tears.  And suddenly he was feeling again, he was burning again; he cradled her to his breast, burying his face in her bedraggled hair, rocking her softly.

            "I don't hate you, Rogue, I don't hate you," he sobbed. "I don't hate you, I love you."

            He clasped her to him, saying the words over and over, desperate to dispel the awful knowledge that he was both lover and murderer.  And then she moaned.  She moaned ever so slightly, he might not have heard it, but that he felt the lightness of her laboured breath upon his neck.  Stunned he drew back and stared into her white face and she moaned again, this time louder.

            Wonder, hope, relief filled him.  Scooping her up into his arms he went and laid her out on the bed, hovering about her, helpless as a caged animal.

            "Rogue, you're alive, wake up, say somethin', please,_ ma chere…"_

            Since he had laid her onto the bed her breathing had become quickened and was now coming in short, ragged gasps.  Again panic took him.  Her face, once white, had become the hue of jaundiced yellow, the pallor of buttermilk.  The water had washed away all the blood on her skin, but for a few dark, half-congealed beads that had formed on the edge of the scar and had began to bleed again.  Remy cursed, pressing his hands over the old wound; her naked flesh was as cool and damp as a mermaid's.  She had never been made of stone – that had been a notion of his own creation, a fallacy; what she was now, he had made of her.

            "Stop bleedin'!" he howled, when he saw the sticky red liquid begin to seep through his fingers. "I ain't hurtin' no more, chere, I wantcha here wit' me, please stop bleedin'!"

            She said nothing.  The only notion he got of her was their connection, the faint, thrumming interplay of invisible connective tissue, like magnetised gossamer.  Through that link, she pulled him to her; he, on the other hand, pulled her to her death.

            Eileen walked the corridor back to their motel room, and not knowing why, halfway there she increased her pace.  Afterwards, alone, in the quiet of her own humdrum life, she would wonder on this moment of walking and increasing her pace – whether it had, in fact, all been down to coincidence, or something far more blasphemous to her nature, the thing called Fate.  

            One of her mutant abilities, one amongst many – she was talented as the multi-dextrous, after all – was that she was able to feel and manipulate the electrical currents around her.  Unlike her other gift of being able to discern other people's mutant capabilities, sensing electrical currents was a daily occurrence to her, and something that she had to live with 24-7 whether she liked it or not.  She could not help then, _feeling the scene inside that small room and experiencing it with every fibre of her being._

            Over the years, one thing she had learnt was that dead people were easier to cope with than dying ones – all that remained of the dead was the residue of the short, electrical impulses that gave them life, and after a few hours, even that would be gone, like a light slowly flickering out.  What she understood, as she entered the room and felt Rogue fading, was the harsh realisation that she had not left the Brotherhood out of her own noble convictions.  The real reason lay in something more brutal, more personal, and thus far more harrowing.  It lay in the fact that she had no longer been able to bear the _feeling_ of St. John Allerdyce, the man she had loved, decaying, day in, day out, minute by cruel minute.

            But now, even as the cold reality swept over her, if you had asked her the truth, she would never have been able to admit it to you.

            "Remy, what the hell is going on here?!"

            He was sitting beside Rogue's inert form, hands pressed against her bare chest.  He barely looked up as she suddenly raced up to the bedside and saw the blood between his hands.  Eileen had seen many grown men cry in her line of business, but never in the way he now wept so openly.

            "Eileen, t'ank de Lord you're here!" he whimpered.

            "What happened?!" she asked, quickly getting to business and pressing her fingers against Rogue's wrist. She felt the faint patter of her pulse flutter against her wrist like light rain beating against a tin roof.  It jumped, skipped and faded in turns.  The intervals between each breath she took became longer and more tremulous.  Eileen's face went grim.

            "Remy," she began as calmly as she could. "Tell me what happened.  Tell me how this happened."

            "It's de scar," he cried, trying desperately to explain what he could not. "It just started bleedin', an' it's all my fault, it's…Shit, woman, tell me what's happenin' t' her!"

            Eileen didn't look at him. "She's gone into shock," she answered, suddenly hesitating.  She couldn't move, couldn't do anything for the strangeness of what she felt.  Her initial reaction had been to send Remy away, to get him to call 911.  But now she saw what he could only feel as some tenuous, indefinable connection; and what Eileen experienced was something far more complex and peculiar than he would ever come realise.  What she felt was their shared physical bond, the raging intercourse of their electrical fields, bursting, fluctuating, flaring, rearranging itself.  Rogue was pulling, sucking on him.  For now, Remy was her life-support, and if Eileen removed him, she knew Rogue wouldn't make it.

            "What're you doin' standin' dere!" he roared at her, breaking her from the trance the dancing molecules had cast upon her. "Tell me what I should do!"

            "Nothing." Eileen regained her voice on a breath. "You do nothing."

            "_Nothin'?!"_

            He would have lunged at her and shaken her, if he hadn't been so busy trying to stem the bleeding; the desperation and fury leapt out of his eyes like a physical thing, red and hot, so that his eyes, too, seemed to bleed.  For a moment Eileen thought he would have attacked her; but then Chase was suddenly in the doorway, evidently having heard the shouts from within.  His face, already gaunt and sallow, had eroded in on itself until he appeared positively cadaverous.

            "Mah Gawd, what's _happened_ to her?" he exclaimed, hovering, face etched in horror. "She's _bleedin'…"_

            "It was me," Remy garbled, holding onto Rogue's hand while Eileen quickly bent over and examined the wound. "It was all my fault, I could've killed her, I could have…"

            "_You did this?!" Chase's face went even more pale than it was already was, his face shrivelled and shrunk until it might almost have not even have existed at all.  There were only his eyes, cats eyes, wide as saucers._

            "Mr. Beddows," Eileen interrupted, her voice once more that comforting aria of urgent, indomitable calm. "I need some clean rags.  Go and get me some.  Now."

            Chase raced off, and Eileen turned back to Rogue, her face suddenly strained, her teeth clenched.

            "I understand now," she stated gruffly. "I'm not sure how it happened but the wounds you received altered you both, yet somehow connected you.  You've got to calm down, Remy.  Are you listening to me?  You've got to calm down.  She's going into shock and her pulse is erratic.  If you don't calm down she's not going to make it."

            "I've killed her!" he wailed.

            "You haven't killed her!" Eileen snapped. "For God's sake, Remy, listen to what I say and clam down!"

            He quietened with an effort as Chase came running back in, a bundle of cloths in his hands, slamming the door shut vigorously behind him.  Eileen grabbed the rags and pressed them against the wound, then instructed Chase, in very simple and concise terms, exactly how to hold them.  The older man did so, his teeth digging into his thin bottom lip, his brow trembling as he now regarded Remy with awe and dread.  Remy ignored him, his hand clinging fast to Rogue's.  Eileen pried one green eye open.  Her face went as hard as steel.

            "Chase, the bleeding…?" she began, her voice cracked.

            "It's stopping," he replied, strained.

            "Den why ain't she gettin' better?" Remy protested, the panic rising in him again. "Surely if the blood stops…"

            "It isn't the bleeding that'll kill her, it's the shock!" Eileen spat.  Her face had gone a more deathly shade of grey than Rogue's.  Her own admission had stunned her into helplessness.

            "Den _you help her!" Remy cried. "For fuck's sake, woman, you manipulate electric currents, don't you?!"_

            She understood immediately what he meant, but for some reason, she hesitated.  The culmination of years of self-pity, arrogance and denial stared her in the face for one split second, and she saw the irrefutable evidence of all her pride and conceit, the crumbling of that one last thing she had held so dear and thrown away with such contempt.  The ugliness of it, of her, appalled her.  If she hesitated, it was for nothing more than that one split second when she saw, clearly, that she was a just a woman.  Without thinking Eileen Harsaw pressed her fingers against Rogue's heart and freed that one burst of energy she vowed she would never use for the sake of one lost love.

            _Hell hath frozen over, she thought, as the old familiar tingling coursed through her fingertips.  She almost laughed._

            Rogue jolted, once.  Inexorable silence followed; Eileen fell onto her knees beside the bed and buried her head against the pillows, but she did not weep.

            Not even when, after what seemed like minutes, she heard the soft, regular sigh of Rogue's breathing once more.

            "You're muties," Chase said, an indeterminable amount of time later.  Eileen lifted her face from the pillows and began to laugh hysterically, neck bent back like a wolf raising its muzzle to the moon and howling.  Remy kept his eyes on Rogue.  A wave of nausea had come over him.

            "Mu-tants," he corrected the older man quietly.  He stood and gently pulled the bedcovers over Rogue.  A slight tinge of colour was coming back into her pasty cheeks.  Eileen had stopped laughing.  Her face was sober again – the werewolf become human.

            "You tell anyone what happened here…" Remy began darkly, addressing Chase, his eyes burning malevolently.  Chase interrupted, laughing coldly.

            "Mistah, ah don't even know what the hell just happened here anyways.  'Sides, you think ah'm gonna give myself any more of a bad press than what ah have already?" He paused, his eyes flickering over to Rogue's now peaceful figure on the bed. "So long as you tell me that what you did to her wasn't on purpose."

            Remy could only shake his head.  He was too exhausted to talk about it.

            "Will she be okay?" he asked Eileen instead.

            "Her blood pressure's probably still low, but if she rests she'll be fine," she replied, standing up slowly.  He looked over at her, both confounded and surprised.  For the first time he had seen a spark of real, unadulterated life in the woman, but now she looked as staid and stoic as ever, as if what he had witnessed had only been a morbid reflection in a distorting Hall of Mirrors.

            "I guess I should say t'anks," he said after a moment. "If you hadn't come when you did…"

            "Actually, I came here because I had something to tell you," she interjected in a low, flat voice.  She looked down at Rogue and her face twisted deprecatingly. "And, I suppose, for an appointment with fate as well."

            He saw her grave expression; his gut lurched.

            "What is it?" he asked, his voice thick with foreboding.

            She looked up at him, blue eyes clear.

            "He's left you another message."

            Remy said nothing, understanding her words, his heart falling.  But he cast Chase a long, sideways glance, knowing that he couldn't give anything away.

            "Where is it?" he queried at last.

            "At the scene," she replied evenly.

            Remy turned, and held onto Rogue's exposed hand.  Another message from the killer.  He understood that Eileen could not have brought it to him – most likely it was being classified as evidence.  He'd have to go for it himself.  But he couldn't leave Rogue.  Not now.

            "I can't leave her," he stated firmly.

            "Remy," Eileen began delicately. "The message…It's rather important."

            "Can't it wait?" he asked.

            "Under the circumstances… I think not."

            He glanced over at her again, seeing how in earnest she was.  He sighed, then turned to Chase.

            "I've got t' go take care of somethin'," he said quietly. "I want y' to watch Anna while I'm gone."

            Chase went pale.

            "Oh no, no, no.  Look Mr. LeBeau, ah'm already involved knee deep in whatever the hell jus' happened here, an' ah ain't getting' any more involved than ah have t', know what ah'm sayin'?  'Sides, ah've got a motel t' run an' business t' do an'…"

            It was Remy's turn to transform into the wolf.  He crossed the room with the wordless stealth of the predator, then picked Chase up off the floor by his collar and glared at him so fiercely that Eileen swore his eyes could have burst into flame.

            "Fuck your motel!" he hissed, shaking the balding man violently. "An' fuck your business!  You're gonna stay here, an' you're gonna watch over her, and if anyt'ing happens to her – anything! – so help me God, I'll _kill_ you!  Understand?!"

            The fear and awe in Chase's eyes was almost infectious.  On the bed, Rogue moaned softly in her sleep, as though complicit in all that was said and Remy's words had filled her with the same sense of dread.  Chase heard it: for some reason, he nodded.

************************************************

            Outside, unbeknownst to them, it had begun to rain.  It was the type of storm that Ororo would have conjured up – midsummer rain, abrupt and torrential, the kind that knew it may never get a chance again before the fall.  Eileen shuttled the car through it, cursing at the fact that visibility was hampered by that thick mantle of rainfall; Remy however, sat in the passenger seat staring at the old book lying on the dashboard, that obnoxious old book named _The Book of Thoth, a relic from another world that had so inexplicably collided with his own._

            It only took them little less than ten minutes before they arrived.  The cops weren't swarming the way they were often liable to – the storm was probably to thank for that.  Eileen shooed away the remaining officers from the room itself; Remy caught the murmurings of dissent, the irate insistences that if another girl died they'd have to bring the bloody FBI in.  Some of the men stared at him suspiciously as they filed out.  To Remy, it was merely the angled bigotry of a lifetime and he ignored it.  He felt utterly displaced.  He could not escape the feeling that he should not have left the motel.

            In a matter of seconds they had the room to themselves.  Annie had just recently been vacated, since she no longer held a claim to anything in the house, let alone the building itself; but the sweet, fetid aroma of her dead body still lingered, imprinted, on the air.

            "She was just a kid," he noted quietly, seeing the various photographs on the dressing table and the wall.  How long they would remain there, no one knew.  No one would pilfer anything so personal, so precious, so entirely inconsequential to anyone else but their owner.  Someone would sort them.  Someone would keep a few as souvenirs.  The rest would be burnt collectively in an unknown backyard.  Annie did not even have a claim on her own image any longer.

            "Sixteen years old," Eileen confirmed from behind him.  She had picked up a brown envelope that had been lying amongst several others on a nearby table.  Remy heard the snap of her disposable gloves as she put them on.  He only turned away from the bed when she had pulled the message out of the bag.  He wanted to go back to Rogue.

            This time, there was no note to accompany the message.  Instead of a tarot card, as he had expected, he saw that it was a normal playing card – the murderer, that clever bastard, was now writing in his own language.  Remy looked at it, emotionless.  Eileen, however, did not need eyes to see the sudden tremor that shuddered through the entire length of his body.

            "We found it underneath the _Queen of Cups_," she informed him softly. "Jones knew it was for you, but I told him to keep quiet until you'd seen it for yourself.  News travels fast in this town; not a few people know that you called her by this name."

            The Queen of Diamonds stared back at him implacably, with the gaze of one who knew that he had condemned her.  Nothing needed to be written.  He understood what it meant, so ambiguous to all but him.  His stomach spiked.  He knew with a dread certainty that he should not have left Rogue alone.  Eileen stared at his lack of reaction, her heart suddenly going cold.

            "But you know, don't you," she breathed, eyes wide, lowering the card and gazing at him. "You already know that Anna's going to be the next victim."

            He turned to the door, jaw set.

            "Take me back," he said.

******************************************


	6. Unison

**. VI .**

            Neither Remy nor Eileen said anything as she raced him back to the motel.  Both knew that it was nearly two days since Annie Walters had been killed, and that tonight, the killer would strike again.  Eileen looked at the road with the fell glance of a Medusa – Remy supposed that she was angry with him for implicating Rogue in the whole sorry mess, and he had no reason to blame her, because most of the blame inside him was already being directed at himself.  They said nothing when the car screeched to a halt outside the motel, but, as he slid out the seat, Eileen gave him a meaningful look that said: _Don't you dare leave that girl for one minute on her own today, you hear me?_

            His response was to slam the door shut and sprint back inside the building.

            Rogue was still lying, quite peacefully, on the bed.  Her cheeks were pink now, and her breathing was normal.  Remy released a shaky sigh of relief.  He noticed that Chase had dressed her in one of his old T-shirts.  At first he was angry that the older man had taken it upon himself to do something so intimate for her, but then he was oddly humbled and grateful.  It was more than he had thought to do.  Careful not to jar her sleep, he sat on the edge of the bed and ran a hand through her hair.  He hadn't done _that_ in a long time.  He was almost surprised at how good it felt.  

            He surveyed the room, silently, his fingers still idly brushing through her hair.  Nothing was out of order and exactly as he had left it.  Chase, however, was nowhere in sight.  That unnerved him even more than the fact that he thought he might have been the killer.  Hadn't he, after all, told the man to watch over her under pain of death?

            "Chase!" he called out irritably. "Chase, where de fuck are you?!"

            It was a while before the answer came.

            "Here!"

            The voice had come from the bathroom.  Puzzled, Remy stood up and opened the door.  He was not a little bemused to see Chase, on his hands and knees in the shower, scrubbing away the pink bloodstains that Rogue had left.

            "What the f-" Remy began, but Chase simply passed him a candid grin.

            "Only makin' sure things are in tip-top shape for the next customers," he replied cheerily. "Ah don't think they'd much appreciate seein' the evidence of a near-murder in their shower, thanks very much.  An' anyways, ah don't want those damned cops comin' an' givin' me hassle no more."

            "Murder?" Remy echoed indignantly. "I wasn't tryin' to murder her!"

            "Whatever," Chase retorted, looking away and scrubbing the last bit of blood away. "If you weren't tryin' t' kill her, then what the hell _were_ you doin' for her to be bleedin' like that?"

            "It was an accident," Remy scowled. "Call it a mutant thing," Chase was irritating him.  Rogue had almost suffered a cardiac, and the man was agonising over his precious bathroom. The only thing Remy wanted right now was to be alone with Rogue, to watch over her, to protect her.

            "Hey," Chase stood up and turned on the shower, flushing the foamy suds down the drain. "Ah ain't got nothin' 'gainst you mutant types, 'kay?  Seen enough o' them in mah time, and ah ain't exactly a paragon o' virtue neither, know what ah'm sayin'?  If you tell me you weren't tryin' t' hurt her, ah'll believe you, son.  Just don't let whatever happened back there happen again.  You've got enough on your plate t' worry about, okay?"

            Remy glared at him.

            "Why should I trust you?" he asked suspiciously.

            "Heh." Chase's expression was self-deprecating. "Ah spent the first half of mah life livin' on the line, son.  It cost me mah woman an' mah two boys.  Took me a long time to get some meanin' back into mah life, an' ah ain't about t' go spoilin' it again, understand?"

            Remy nodded, distracted.  He just wanted the man to finish up and get out.

            "Well, looks like ah'm done," Chase continued with a note of satisfaction.  He packed away his cleaning materials with his usual fastidiousness, then brushed past Remy and into the room. "Oh, and by the way, your girlfriend woke up and asked for you while you were out.  Ah made her drink a li'l water, figured it'd do her some good." He half-smiled. "She's got fire in her that one, you'd swear she was invulnerable or somethin'. Demanded ah get some clothes for her, then went right out like a light again.  Ah gave her one o' your Tee's, hope you don't mind."

            "No.  Thank you," Remy replied quickly.  Chase seemed to sense that he wanted to be alone with her, so he nodded once, opened the door, and left.

            Remy sighed, shook his head in bemusement at Chase's oddball manner, and went over to Rogue's side again.  He allowed himself to glance over at the clock.  Three o'clock.  Nine more hours to go before the day was over.  Nine more hours to thwart the killer, the killer who thought he knew Remy's mind.  He would do the only thing he could.  He would stay with her; he would keep her close.  He would never let her go again.

            He knelt down beside her, took her hand in his own.  But in taking her hand, he had acknowledged one of his greatest sins of all – that he had condemned the woman he loved.

            "We're a part of each other now, chere," he murmured softly to her sleeping face. "It's crazy, but somehow, dat day in Madripoor, Vargas connected us.  All de pain we give makes us bleed.  An' I hurt you so much, p'tite, it all came back to me.  I bled for you, Rogue, darlin'.  All dat bleedin' was for you." He paused, drew her hand against his cheek. "I'm sorry, chere.  I'm sorry."

            The words expelled, he was exhausted.  Resting his head beside her arm, he slept.

            He woke, much later – his lips were pressed against the softness of her right wrist, as if he had imprinted the taste of her in sleep.  Perturbed he sat up and stared at her, still tranquil in her slumber.  For the first time since he could remember he simply watched her sleeping, and it seemed that he saw a new aspect of her, a fey, a ghost, an angel.  He could not remember the last time she had appeared so incredibly and indescribably beautiful to him.  Something about her – or was it him? – had changed, and what he saw suddenly moved him.  He reached out to touch her cheek, an exercise in dispelling the sense of unreality that had suddenly come over him; but the longer he touched her, the more the unreality lingered and exacerbated his nerves.  Whatever he felt when he touched her, it disturbed and confused him more than any sense of disconnection he may have had before.  It was the feeling that he was very firmly there in his own body, and that a part of him wasn't dead at all, but rather, an extension of her.

            Flesh – not stone or marble, but flesh, soft and pink and warm and scented.  Galatea had come to life, awakened by the thing that now moved and stirred inside him, as subtly insidious as the bite of the serpent that had instigated the Fall.  He knew what it was.  Passion, refound.

            Curious, he lightly thumbed the edge of the scar that peeked out from under the neckline of her T-shirt; he felt himself feel her like a silver cord inside his body being plucked.  It was inevitable and impulsive that he should follow the natural progression of the scar downward to trace the smooth curve of her breast through the white cotton.  He halted when he had circuited the crescent, abruptly and hopelessly aroused.  The soft, dark crest of her nipple, invisible, taunted him beneath the thin fabric.  He wanted to put his mouth on her.  He wanted to put his mouth on her and kiss every inch of her; he wanted to make love to her with the delicate fervour of rediscovery.  Her body, so long denied him, would be his archaeology.

            He noticed then, that her green eyes were open, and staring candidly into his own.  He removed his hand out a sense of propriety, but was somewhat disconcerted to find that he felt neither shame nor guilt.  She met his gaze calmly, a flicker of interest in her composed neutrality.

            "How long've you been sittin' there?" she asked, after a moment of such deliciously subtle tension that neither was quite sure they had felt it.

            "How long've you been awake?" he returned.

            A ghost of a smile played upon her lips.

            "Long enough," she answered ambiguously, and sat up.

            "You should still be restin', chere," he protested as she slid out of bed.

            "Ah'm fine, Remy," she retorted, standing in the middle of the room and stretching with the languid sensuality of a cat, as if she knew the effect she had on him.  He found he could not avert his gaze.

            "No, you ain't, chere," he continued to reason with her. "D'you know what nearly happened t' you dis afternoon?  If Eileen hadn't……."

            "Ah went into shock, big deal," she cut in, in her usual gung ho tone, although he caught the shreds of fatigue there and his concern increased despite her protest. "Weren't nothin' compared to Madripoor, an' Vargas' wound was fresh back then.  Ah didn't even black out then, not once."

            "But you don't understand, Rogue," he began again anxiously. "Your scar…….My scar…….That bleedin', it's……."

            He trailed off, unable to explain it.  She stared at him through strands of white hair; her expression was suddenly subdued.

            "Ah know," she said at last, seriously.  He couldn't say anything to that.  Seeing his bewildered countenance, she passed him that wisp of a smile again. "Remy, trust me. Ah'm fine.  Maybe a li'l woozy, but that's 'cos ah've been sleepin' all day, an' if ah spend another minute in bed ah'll never be able t' get up again.  'Sides, ah'm hungry."

            "Hungry……." The remembrance of such a thing suddenly welled up within him. "I'll order us a pizza."

            She passed him an odd look.

            "Remy, you _hate_ pizza.  Why don't we go out an' eat?"

            "_Non_," he replied quickly.  He was darned if he was going to let her leave the room. "We stay here." He got up and went to the phone, attempting to hide his arousal from her.  It never ceased to amaze him that she always managed to bounce back like so much India rubber. "'Sides, it's still pourin' outside.  Who'd wanna go out in weather like dis?"

            "Bit of rain never hurt anyone." She shrugged. "Well, you do whatever you want.  Ah'm gonna go have a shower."

            She went.

            The next several minutes Remy spent staring at the clock, immersed in his newfound sense of desire.  Even as he sat there, humming idly to himself, he felt it running underneath the surface of his skin, quite quiet; he did not know whether it was the heat of his blood that he could feel, or the heat of his desire.  Night fell in indeterminable minutes, as it always does in the middle of summer.  Rain buffeted against the window.  He closed the curtains slowly and thought about Rogue.  He glanced at the clock and thought about the Queen of Diamonds.  Ten o'clock.

            "Only two more hours to go…" he muttered to himself.

            Ten minutes later, Rogue emerged from the shower.  The scent that came in from the bathroom smelt different to the way it usually did.  Sweet, light, sultry – different but oh, so familiar.  Lavender.  He was perplexed as if the world had suddenly turned itself over and gravity had left.  The perfume radiated from her like a sweltering, midsummer sunset.  His pulse quickened.

            "Did you call?" she asked.

            "_Oui_," he answered.  His voice was hoarse.  Anymore than that he didn't know what to say.  He swallowed and looked away.  The scent of her was a voluptuous, erotic memory come to life; it frustrated his senses, confounded him in a way he had never experienced before.  He had never known that she could have seduced him so utterly.  He glanced absently at the clock, only for his gaze to be drawn back to her again.  She stood, her back to him, passing a brush idly through her hair.  Without thinking, without knowing why he did so, he reached out to reconcile memory to flesh, to close the aching gap of unreality.  His hand touched her bare shoulder, light, tentative.  She stiffened.

            "Remy…" she began quietly, the warning implicit in her tone.

            "I know," he replied gently, relaxing his grip but not wanting to draw his hand away. "I'm sorry.  For everythin'.  If only I'd understood sooner……." He trailed off, uncertain.

            "You should have told me," she answered, her tone softer, placing the brush down. "Why didn't you tell me what was happenin' to you?  That you were bleedin'?  That ah was hurtin' you?"

            She was motionless, neither moving to embrace him nor push him away.  Heartened, he leaned into her, nestling his face against her hair, breathing in the scent of her.  She let him do so, but he felt the muscles in her shoulder tighten even further.

            "Not you hurtin' me, chere," he answered after a moment. "It was all the hurt I was givin' you."

            She said nothing for a long time, as though quietly assessing his words; in the silence, he was taken back to that memory, that memory of holding her and scenting the fragrance of her hair, and he brushed aside the locks from her neck delicately, stroking the tender flesh there lightly.  She moved away quickly, turning to face him, her green eyes hard – her mouth, however, gave her away.

            "Not now, Remy," she said, her voice low.

            "But I thought……." he persisted, stepping forwards, but she put out a hand and placed it on his chest, holding him back.

            "You pushed me away, Remy," she explained shortly, almost warily. "An' now…shouldn't ah do the same t' you?" She paused, winced – her hand trembled over the scar on his heart.  They could almost feel it, the source of their strange connection, both tangible and at the same time achingly impalpable.  Her expression changed; she perplexed, unable to deny the bond that was theirs.  She could not move her hand away. "Couldn't you feel it?" she asked in a half-whisper, her tone almost accusing. "Couldn't you tell?" She raised her head, catching his gaze.  The look they shared momentarily confused them, the way it had done when they had first laid eyes upon one another.  Suddenly bewildered, he was the first to break away.

            "I thought," he began, slowly, trying desperately to explain what he could not. "I really thought a part o' me was dead.  But it wasn't.  It was a part of you an' I never knew."

            She half-smiled, a pale smile, as though she'd always known it.

            "Hasn't it always been that way?" she answered plainly.

            He marvelled that it had always been so simple to her.  Looking at her now, all the hate, all the recriminations seemed so futile.  To her, nothing had ever changed.  And he would have thrown it all away out of selfishness.

             Instinctively he drew an arm about her waist and pulled her into his embrace, holding her the way she had always wanted him to, rocking her gently, stroking her hair, with such tenderness; it was the only way he could say sorry.  She drew her head back, her gaze dark, assessing.  He had no need to speak – this was, after all, the incommunicable language of love that they now conversed in, with bodies, with eyes.  She felt his hardness pressed against her, his strength, his promise.  Only then did she concede that she understood him.  She held his face and kissed him, awkward at first, shy, as though the knowledge of his lust made her bashful.  But the memory of his lips pressed against her wrist had been imprinted onto him, too imperfect, a map uncharted.  He kissed her with a hunger and bravery that made her knees go weak; when his hands slid under the shirt, his unrepentant urgency compelled her to moan her acquiescence.

            The knock sounded at the door.

            He released her, wordless; went to the door, opened it, paid the man, thanked him, closed the door.  Then he walked back silently into the room, threw the pizza box onto the table and looked at her, any appetite he might have had purged by another more consuming.  Slowly she lifted the shirt, unselfconscious as the girls at Mardi Gras, but he'd never seen an action more exquisite, more inexpressibly beautiful as that.  This was her acknowledgement, of his desire, of their need, to be recreated through the definition of one another's flesh.

            They made love, with the feverish passion of new-found lovers; there was nothing, he thought, ever so strange and intimate as that one single night, not before, not ever after.  She, soft, pink, velvet emptiness – he would _brouter le cresson_, and kiss her there, and it would be nothing so crude as lust but mere supplication.

            She caressed his hair and sighed.

            When she feels him inside her she knows, or remembers – but somehow this time is different, like it is the first time and the others were but dreams, or premonitions.  He holds her face, watching, wondering, every stroke loaded with courage.  Between each quivering breath she smiles inscrutably, and she doesn't even know why.  She smiles inscrutably until she cries out, fragile as shattered glass, Ophelia, drowned.

            He cradles her, his dispossession forgotten.

            Neither was or is dispossessed, for now – and always, if only they knew it – each is possessed of the other.

*************************************

            Later: the rain had stopped.

            Outside, the night had become indigo again, artlessly, imperceptibly – it was an hour of the morning where the colour of the sky would change, and no one but the nocturnals, the insomniacs and the revellers would know the difference.  The room was thick with silence; the window, half open, shyly courted that soft, steady trickle of noise – drip, drip, drip – rainwater was running off the gutter and into the arms of the already turgid, pregnant earth.  Far away, a dog bayed, pitiful, ragged.  But the pervading sound was of silence, as if the room contained all the silence in the world.

            Rogue stirred, jarred into somnolent wakefulness by the insubstantial residue of an unremembered dream.  Or, rather, a series of dreams; they skirted on the edge of her consciousness with an elusive, aqueous grace, each one as distinct and disunited as the fish-like psyches that were, still, floating around murmurously in her head.  Perhaps the dreams were not hers but someone else's.  All she knew was that they had awoken her; in the darkness, in the evanescent haze between wake and sleep, she caught the tattered shreds of her nightmares, sounds and sights and touches too wretched to tell.

            Remy was still awake, the crimson light of his gaze falling first on the clock, then on the window.  This was a scene she had become accustomed to in recent weeks – she would wake up on the heels of some disturbing yet irretrievable dream; he would be lying there, still and silent as a lycanthrope, wide awake with the taciturn vigilance of a sniper watching his prey.  

            "Still awake?" she murmured, voice slurred with sleep, rolling over onto her side to face him.  The clock read 04:00.  Too round a number, too precise.  She felt as though she'd been woken up deliberately by some unseen hand.

            "Can't sleep," he replied.  She did not think he had slept more than a couple of hours a night the past week.

            "Stop thinkin' about them," she muttered, draping an arm about his waist and closing her eyes.  The vestiges of her nightmares were leaving her, and she suddenly felt drowsy again.

            "Thinkin' about what?"

            "The murders," she replied. "Just for tonight, stop thinkin' about them."

            He was quiet for a long while as she snuggled up into the crook of his arm.  She was almost asleep again before he spoke once more.

            "Talk to me, Rogue," he asked softly, as if her voice were the only comfort that could assuage his troubled mind.

            "'Bout what?" she murmured.

            His fingers brushed along the length of her arm, measured, languid. "Tell me 'bout Anna," he asked at last.

            So she told him.  She told him about Anna, even though she couldn't remember who Anna was but a phantom from a muddled existence, the name given to a chapter of transient life, an object unbound from reality as a helium balloon leaving the earth to abode with the sky, or as fairy stories once grounded in truth.  Anna was the proper noun given to the memory of splashing in the Mississippi at high summer, of dancing in the cornfields of Caldecott County, of the girlish stirrings of romance too soon cut short.  Anna had no home, she had no kin, and she had no roots.  She was a being based upon dreams and memories that bore no resemblance to the real world.  She was a child as all children were – untrammelled, unfettered, defined only by their limited conception of life.

            But if Anna was elusive, Raven was even more so – while Anna was bright and sunny, Raven was dark and sensual, and even Anna was a little afraid of what she seemed to know yet would not tell.  Raven was like an older sister, whose knowledge was like the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden; like Eve, Raven had eaten of the tree – the darkness had fallen over her eyes, and for all her voluptuous beauty, she was forever tainted by what she knew.  Raven, pseudonym for the unnerving, intoxicating glamour of all that is woman.

            So who is Anna Raven?

            Anna is past and present.  Anna is fantasy and reality.  Anna is child and woman.  Anna is…..Anna is a paradox.

            Rogue trails off, unable to explain anymore than these short little tales of collected, subjective, partial memory.  Soon she drifts back into her dreams of golden childhood and dark-haired princesses, and this time, her sleep is untroubled.  Remy though, finds no solace in her stories.  He remains awake, and runs his fingers absently up the length of her arm, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards; pensive, pendular.

            _Anna goes both ways._

_            Anna is a palindrome._

**************************************

Gratuitous stock-taking or calm before the storm…..:p  Next chapter things will finally being to wrap up.


	7. Deceptions

**. VII .**

*******************

            Thirteen hours and forty-nine minutes later, Remy LeBeau would suddenly realise that he had made a very bad mistake.  It _had_ to be a mistake, one more in a long list of many, and he didn't want to believe it.

            He stood with the gun in his hand, heavy as a dead weight; heavy, cold, and immutably alien.  One finger, numb with rainwater, trembled on the trigger.  And the woman, horrendous, inhuman as her naked body damned her to be, gazed back up at him with wide and staring eyes, terrified, bewildered, pleading.  Beneath her lay a single card – the Queen of Diamonds, a stark testament to this, his final betrayal

            Only then did he understand what the phrase meant – 'redemption through sacrifice.'

            Only he understood too late.

            Behind him, Eileen stumbled into the grove like a woman fated, hair wet and bedraggled, her expression emerging from the shadows, aghast, pale as a ghost.  She lifted her torch and stared at him.

            "Oh my God," she croaked. "Anna…"

**************************

*

            That morning had heralded some sort of respite from the rain; from the sounds of the weather forecasts, it was all set to change again by the late afternoon, and another wave of torrential storms would be coming in from the east.  Since room #102 didn't have a TV or radio on, neither Rogue nor Remy would know about it until it happened – in their world, now, the morning is the morning and it could go on forever, just like this; sun shining with a pale, watery glow, the thickness of the afternoon's humidity not quite yet in the air.  Such is the definition of the morning, according to the blissfully ignorant, those who have not yet been contaminated by the baleful omens of the weatherman.

            To tell the truth, neither Rogue nor Remy really cared much about the weather that morning, or even about the weather that afternoon.  Both were locked in their own private little domains; it seemed reasonable, seeing as they'd partaken of one another so intimately the night before.

            Remy was locked in his own little world simply because he assumed that he was the only one awake.  No one ever rightly knew what went on in his mind – he had, Professor Charles Xavier had once concluded, 'thoughts like quicksilver'[1] – yes, even the most powerful telepath in the world had admitted that!  And yes, Remy enjoyed it, he enjoyed riling the Professor, and Jean, and poor, poor Betsy. (Although Betsy had, ironically, come closest to penetrating his deepest, darkest secret, the _mechant fille_).  Not to mention Sage – oh, how he loved to drive Sage mad!  But whatever he was thinking now, as he leant with his butt against the back of Eileen's favourite chair, engrossed in the local newspaper and drinking coffee, was anyone's guess.  What Remy's private world consisted of – besides gambling, women, kleptomania and women – was a veritable mystery.

            Rogue liked to wonder what was going on in his mind.  She would often stare at him, when he was engaged in something else and when she knew he wouldn't know she was looking.  Right now, her own private little world consisted of one thing, and it was called Remy.  She had woken up five minutes earlier thinking he would still be lying beside her and had felt a little grumpy, when, rolling over, she'd seen him standing there by the window, leaning with his butt against the back of Eileen's favourite chair, engrossed in the local newspaper and drinking coffee.  Normally, his mind was as inscrutable to her as Mississippi mud – not to mention her own muddled past.  It was only at times like these that she would catch a glimpse of his thoughts, in a blink of an eye, in a twitch of the lips, in a crease of the brow – although what she saw in these imprecise signals she could never put a name to.  That was the fun of the game.  That was why she was lying huddled in bed with only her face poking out from under the duvet, staring at him.

            Her study of him that morning had, however, quickly degenerated.  At first, she had considered the dark rings around his eyes – he was tired, and more than that, troubled.  That had worried her.  And the shape of his mouth – so grim!  _That _meant he was hiding something from her.  (Yes, Rogue knew that particular look; she'd seen it often enough.)  And the way he held the edge of the paper between his index and middle finger, toying with it lightly; that meant he was dying for a smoke.  Rogue had frowned at that.

            Then she'd inevitably become distracted by the fact that he was shirtless, and how much she loved it when he'd go around shirtless, although she'd never admit it to him; she thought he knew the truth anyway, because he was so damn good at seeing right through her.  And goddammit she loved his stomach, his outrageously well-toned stomach, the kind that Calvin Klein's were made for, the kind that made you want to go right down there and_ do _things…

            She stifled a giggle and hugged the duvet to her mouth.  He, however, wasn't to be fooled and casually glanced at her over the top of his newspaper – he seemed to be more alert than usual that deceptively transitory summer morning.

            "So Gambit looks funny dis mornin', neh?" he greeted her, a knavish grin lighting his face.  She couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled at her like that – while he was sober anyhow.  It sent delicious shivers up her spine.  She pulled the duvet away from her face.

            "Gambit looks jus'_ fine_," she replied discerningly.  It amused her the way he had a habit of referring to himself in the third person.

            "O' course he does," he retorted, feigning annoyance and lifting the paper again, although he made no attempt to hide the small smile on his lips.  It made her bold.

            "Remy, come back t' bed," she whined.

            "Been in bed all mornin', chere," he answered, not looking at her. "It's time you got up, _mon 'tit chou-chou_."

            "But you're s'pposed to wait until ah wake up," she pouted. "Ah want t' hug you, dammit."

            "Den get outta bed and hug me here," he returned.  It was not hard to catch the distracted note to his voice; she knew it was useless arguing with him.  Frowning, and feeling a little put out, she slid out of bed and pulled on her underwear.  Looking at the clock, she saw that it was nearly midday.  Had she really been sleeping in that long?  She yawned.  What she needed was a big cup of coffee.  Last night seemed to be one big void to her – apart from making love to Remy, of course.  She got the faint impression that at some point she'd been dreaming, but anything more than that she couldn't remember.  She hooked her bra pensively.  The dreams, so frayed that they appeared inconsequential, clung to her mind like tattered cobwebs.  If only they wouldn't bother her so…

            She gasped as Remy's arms came up stealthily from behind and encircled her waist, breaking her train of thought.  She had been so absorbed in her reverie that she hadn't even heard him put down his paper and crawl across the bed on his knees to embrace her.

            "I'm sorry," he apologised humbly, planting a tender kiss behind her ear. "Didn't mean to treat you so harsh, chere."

            "It's okay," she replied, leaning her head back against his shoulder, her troubles abruptly forgotten. "Ah've been sleepin' in all mornin' when ah'm usually up with the sunrise." She sighed. "Ah can't tell you how much ah miss flyin', Remy.  Now ah ain't got nothin' t' do but stay in bed."

            "We can go back t' bed, if y' want," he murmured into her hair. "Nowhere else I'd rather be right now."

            She chuckled and swivelled round to face him. "What you need is some rest, Cajun," she told him archly, placing her hands on his cheeks and pressing her nose to his own. "You didn't sleep at all last night, did you?" she added with concern. "Why don't you tell me what's worryin' you?  You ain't been sleepin' proper ever since we got here."

            He was doing that thing with his mouth again.  Screwing it up, like crumpled paper, the way he always did when he didn't want to come clean with her.  She stared at him until she knew he would give in.

            "Last night dat psycho was scheduled to take out his next victim, Roguey," he said after a moment. "An' I just can't help t'inkin' dat it's all my fault, chere, dat it's me who's responsible for what happened t' all dose poor women."

            "That's crazy talk, Remy," she cut him off gently. "You're not t' blame for what happened t' them.  There wasn't anythin' you could've done about it.  Ah know how involved you've been gettin' into this whole sorry affair, Remy, but it ain't your business.  You can't let it take over your life."

            "De killer's _makin'_ it my business," he muttered darkly, his brow furrowed with such distress that it surprised her. "An' what if he didn't kill last night, chere?  What if he's still hangin' around, what if he ain't goin' t' let up until he's got what he wants?"

            "Then there's nothin' we can do about it," she answered simply. "Eileen an' the others will sort it out.  It ain't got nothin' t' do with us."

            Remy remained silent.  He could not tell Rogue what he knew; much less because of the fact that if he did so, he would be admitting that he _was_ indeed responsible, not only for the lives of those other women, but for her own.  If the killer did indeed know his mind, then somehow Remy's misconceived resentment towards Rogue had taken on a life of its own in the mind of the murderer.  Remy had condemned her, and she didn't even know it.  Last night had only provided her a stay of execution – he _knew_ that now.  He could protect her, guard her with the life that she had given back to him – but it would not be enough.  So long as the killer was alive, it would _never_ be enough.

            "Remy," Rogue continued, stroking his face affectionately when his expression still remained troubled. "It's going to be okay.  We're together now.  It's what we've always wanted, to be away from that crazy mansion and those crazy people, and to just be _normal_.  For once, we get t' be selfish.  An' ah don't even care about what's goin' on outside anymore.  All ah care 'bout is us."

            She paused, and both were suddenly aware that their scars touched, that they were locked in the same space they had occupied the moment that Vargas' sword had driven through them.  It was a reminder that, whatever happened, as long as those scars lasted they would be one, symbiotic creatures in both love and pain.

            "You're right, _ma chere_," he spoke up quietly. "Dis Cajun, he's been _couyon_[2].  So long as we stay together, everyt'ing's gonna be all right.  An' I ain't never gon' leave you, Rogue.  Not never."

            He kissed her, their talisman, their last defence.

            From what?

            Neither knew, nor cared.

            Later, the rain came along to shatter their fragile conception of the morning.  But by that time, their conception was only of one another.

******************************

            For the first time in weeks, Remy slept soundly, well into the evening.  Rouge sat, cross-legged, on the bed beside him, watching the TV on mute.  Local channel, local news, local murders that shouldn't happen to 'good people', whoever _they_ were; rumours that the FBI were coming in.  Rogue flicked the channel, absently leaning forward to delicately brush away a stray strand of hair from the face of her slumbering lover.  She yawned, gently running a finger over the scar on his chest, meditating on the events of the past week.  It was something of a miracle that he slept.  But lovers always work miracles.  She had held him, and stroked his hair, and cradled his head in her bosom until he couldn't say no to her; not one word of protest he had made, before he had finally succumbed to sleep.  The storm outside had merely been their lullaby.

            Next: the world news on CNN.  Anti-mutant riots in major cities across the globe, New York, London, Rome, Berlin; an exposé on the Paris branch of X-Corporation; flooding kills hundreds of Chinese peasants living on the banks of the Yangtse River; a special report on the psychological effects of child abuse…

            Rogue shuddered and switched off the TV.  The knock at the door, as if prompted by stage-cue, followed.

            Rogue got up to answer it, but Remy was faster, suddenly leaping out of bed like a wildcat, pulling his pants back on, and darting across the room.  Rogue simply gaped at him.  She was absolutely certain that he'd been completely out for the count only a few seconds ago.  And now he was leaping about at the faintest sound like his life depended on it?

            "What the hell d'you think you're doin'?" she inquired archly, before he had reached the door.  It disconcerted her to think that his nerves were still so frayed that he could hear a knock at the door in his sleep. "Ah'm perfectly capable of answerin' the door mahself, y'know."

            "I know, chere," he answered quickly, before pushing on the door handle. "But dat maniac's already been round here once, an' I'm not lettin' him take any chances wit' you."

            He was somewhat disappointed then, to see the nondescript Dom Jones standing in the doorway.

            "So I'm the killer now, am I?" the bespectacled CSI remarked with some amusement, evidently having caught the tail end of Remy's speech.

            "My poppa tol' me never t' trust no cops," Remy replied, looking the shorter man up and down coolly. "'Sides, wasn't it you who said de killer always returns t' de crime scene?"

            "This isn't a crime scene," Jones answered smoothly, but with a lack of finesse that even he felt self-conscious of. "And I'm not a cop.  Besides, Ms. Harsaw sent me.  Urgent stuff.  She's in a state right now.  She wants you to go down and see her right away."

            "Eileen in a state?" Remy raised a well-marked eyebrow. "Dat's twice in two days.  _Femme_ mus' be headin' for a nervous breakdown."

            "What's happened?" Rogue asked, coming up from behind and seeing the solemn look on Jones' face.  Remy had heard her rustling about in the background, but her expression was now suspiciously unflustered. "Is she all right?"

            "Pretty much," Jones replied dourly, passing Rogue an oddly assessing look. "Apart from the fact that last night another girl went missing."

            Remy stared at him sharply.

            "_What_?"

            "Fourth vic, we're guessing," Jones returned. "Except now it seems she isn't a vic – yet."

            "What do you mean?" Rogue asked.

            "Guy left another encoded message for Remy here, right in the place he abducted her.  Sounds like he's playing a game.  It seems to imply the whereabouts of the girl.  Ms. Harsaw asked for me to fetch you right away.  She said you'd better come and see what it said."

            Remy lent into the doorframe, pounding his fist into the jamb.  What the hell was the murderer playing at?  Was he taunting him because Remy had thwarted his plan to make Rogue his next victim?  Or had Remy just jumped to conclusions about that?  Did the killer have some other trick up his sleeve?  The hand he'd dealt Remy wasn't exactly a good one.  From here on in, he'd have to bluff his next move.

            "All right," he said at last. "We'll play dis son of a bitch's fucked up game.  I just hope you're wrong 'bout dis, and dat dis girl's life ain't lyin' in my hands."

            "We'll see," Dom rejoined calmly.

            "An' what about me?" Rogue asked from the sidelines.

            Remy thought about it.  Taking into consideration yesterday's episode, he didn't want to have to put her through anymore stress than she'd been through already – by all accounts, she ought to have been in bed resting herself, if he'd had things his way.  But he couldn't risk having her out of his sight, not for one moment.  Not with that maniac loose.  He'd neglected her enough as it was.

            "I'm sorry, chere," he said at last. "I'd feel better 'bout t'ings if I had you wit' me."

            She grinned wryly at him. "Are you kiddin'?  Ah'm comin' with you, Cajun, whether you like it or not." 

***********************************

            The 'message' had comprised of three cards.

            Eileen had spread them out on the backseat of her car, while the rain probed the roof of this, their seeming last bastion against the world.  The cards were old, ostentatious, French.  Sixteenth century.  The _Death_ card was the message's florid opening, the emblem that signified that this was for Remy's eyes only.  Then there was the _Queen of Wands_, victim #4 of course, a red-haired woman, imperious, her hand resting upon the spotted crest of a tame, almost servile leopard.  And in-between the two, coupling both catalyst and victim, lay the murderer's _modus operandi_.  The _Hanged Man._

            Remy had simply stared at it, uncomprehending.  The picture on the card meant nothing to him, except that it aroused in him a vague feeling of uneasiness.  The singular image was of a man, tied upside down to a tree by his feet.  It was a parody of death, or so it seemed – a state of inertia, a state of suspension.  For who could truly die by being strung up from the feet?  From the deep recesses of his Catholic upbringing, Remy had remembered the story of St. Peter, how he'd been nailed to a cross upside down and had stayed there for absolute days before giving in to the inevitable end.  Days.

            However, according to Eileen's infernal book, the _Hanged Man _was the Death card proper.  'Redemption through sacrifice.  Enforced sacrifice.  Suffering.  Loss, defeat, failure'.  That was what the book had to say about their predicament.  To Remy, those were more than just bad odds.  If he had known that the book had also said 'deception, misconception, illusion', then later, looking into those pale, staring eyes with his finger on the trigger, perhaps he would have laughed at his own stupidity.

            "You're t'inkin' de girl is still alive?" Remy asked the head CSI from the backseat of the car.  Eileen's eyes remained on the road, the shadow of the windscreen wiper intermittently slicing her face into viscous strips of black and colour.

            "Her body hasn't been found," she replied evenly. "And from what we've seen so far, the killer only leaves cards with dead bodies.  But now we have a different situation.  He leaves the message in the place where he abducts his prey – in her house.  He leaves the _Death_ card, which means he's talking to _you_.  He leaves the _Queen of Wands_, which means he's referring to his victim.  They're both simply the players in his game.  It's the _Hanged Man_ that's the clue.  It's the message.  It's the one thing that this entire game pivots on."

            Remy looked outside the window as they approached the old forest.  The murky outline of the trees masked the horizon like a blot of black ink.  He stroked the stubble on his chin pensively.

            "The _Hanged Man_ means a sacrifice," he spoke softly. "So the killer abducts his next victim and leaves a message written specifically for me.  He wants me t' go be a part of his sick game.  He wants _me_ t' watch de sacrifice." He turned to look at Eileen's face in the rear-view mirror, eyes flashing. "Why me, Eileen?" he asked.

            "As far as I can work out, the bastard has a certain empathy with you," she returned wryly. "He thinks you understand him.  He thinks he understands _you_."

            "Y' mean t' say, he t'inks dat I _want_ him t' go round killin' women?" he retorted in disbelief.

            "Who knows what the nutcase thinks," she muttered in reply.

            They pulled over outside the forest and got out of the car.  Dom Jones slammed the passenger door shut and looked up.  The fleshy glint of the trees' canopies glimmered in the headlights of the car.  For some reason, in the rain and the dark, the trees seemed to be taller, more impenetrable.

            "This is it," he said, squinting his eyes from behind his thick-rimmed glasses.

            The _Hanged Man_, of course, had had a double meaning.  Jones had understood it almost immediately, recounting in that flat, vapid tone of his, tales from the early days of the pioneers, tales of how this forest on the edge of town was famous for being the home of the old Hanging Tree.  Over the centuries, the tree had been used to lynch everyone from suspected witches to blacks to child molesters to mutants.  Tonight was to be a momentous occasion in the history of the Hanging Tree.  Blood was not going to be spilt in the noble causes of justice and righteousness, oh no.  This time it was going to be murder, pure and simple.

            Not unless Remy had anything to do with it.

            "Remind me why I'm here," he muttered, looking up into the impermeable layer of trees.  He dug his hands into his pockets.  Beside him, Rogue was standing in the rain, eyes focused on some indeterminable space in mid-air, silent as she had been the entire journey so far.  He furtively reached out to stroke the back of her hand tenderly, as much for his own encouragement as hers.  The softness of her skin grounded him, gave him some sense of assurance.  Nevertheless, for once he shared her misgivings about ever having left the relative comfort of the motel at all.

            "Obviously he wants you to go to the Hanging Tree to meet him," Eileen stated matter-of-factly, bringing out torches from the back of the car and handing one to each of them. "All you have to do is go down there and find out why.  We suspect the girl is still alive.  If you go in alone, do what he says and _don't_ threaten him in any way, then maybe she'll stay that way."

            "I take it you and de cops are gonna be hangin' round as back-up," Remy returned sullenly.  He was feeling irrationally peevish about that.  He didn't mind working with superheroes.  He didn't even mind falling in with supervillains, if it seemed a good idea at the time.  But working with the cops – something about that was inherently heinous.  If the Guilds ever found out about this his reputation would be ruined right quick.

            "I've had the police stationed covertly at several points outside the wood," Eileen returned, mopping water from her forehead. "And they'll give us the necessary back-up should we need it.  Jones will be our contact."

            "So what exactly d'you want me t' do?" Remy asked her. "Chat wit' de guy?  'Hi, I'm Remy LeBeau, ex-t'ief, an' you might be Mr So-an'-So, murderer'?"

            "Do whatever's necessary," Eileen replied dryly, ignoring the sarcastic comment. "You're supposed to have a way with words anyway, aren't you?  Besides, if things start getting hairy you needn't worry.  I'll be ghosting you and monitoring your progress." She smiled grimly and pulled aside her raincoat, displaying the gun in the holster at her belt. "I'll also be armed."

            "Hm," Remy gave her a lop-sided smile. "Since it's rainin' an' all, I thought you'd be able to give him a nice zap wit' dose electric powers o' yours."

            She shook her head but conceded a half smile.

            After that, the four of them had entered into the woods.

            They had followed Jones, who knew the way to their destination unknown.  Remy didn't like it anymore than he trusted the bespectacled man, but said nothing.  He felt unaccountably like a pig being led to the slaughter.  Not just because of what inevitably lay on the other end of their journey, but also because he had no conception of where they were being led.  They could have been in a labyrinth, for all he knew.  And he had no Ariadne to provide the golden thread that would mark his way out of the maze.  He only had his wits.  And the perceived affinity that the killer presumed they shared.

            The wood was dense.  Someone had beaten a pathway before them, but even now, it had begun to grow over, and for long stretches brush and bracken would hinder their progress.  The darkness was so thick the torchlight barely pierced it.  The rain, though less heavy than it was outside of the forest, had begun to bite into their clothing, remorseless.  Remy had started to lag behind, not out of fear, but rather cold and exhaustion.  His sense of disorientation bewildered him.

            "Remy."

            Rogue was suddenly walking beside him, her hand on his arm.  That was when he realised that he _did_ have an Ariadne; if he became lost, she was the reason to find a way out again.  Their nebulous connection was his golden thread.  He felt guilty, having forced her out into the stormy night and into the woods – but then, he couldn't afford to leave her alone in the car out on the road and away from his watchful eye.  He also knew that she wouldn't have let him go anywhere without her anyway.

            "I'll be okay, chere," he assured her with a smile he knew did not reach his eyes, and which she, nevertheless, could not see.  Her hand tightened on his arm, urgent.  He stopped, turning to face her.  In the pallid torchlight, he saw the fire in her green eyes, an expression a thousand times more eloquent than words.

            "Roguey, I'm doin' the right t'ing," he reassured her again.

            "Ah know," she replied quietly, holding his gaze with a ferocity that told him that there was something more she wanted to say but could not.  Then, impulsively, she reached out and wound her right hand into his hair, pulled his lips to hers and kissed him fiercely.  Her left hand, however, surreptitiously pressed the gun into his open palm.  The weight of it hung in his hand a moment, ominous, the difference between life and death.

            He dropped it into his trenchcoat pocket.

            Little did either of them know how that small action would seal both their fates.

            "Do you mind?" Jones hissed back at them irritably.

********************

            'Redemption through sacrifice.'

            From the very beginning, this whole thing had been about redemption.  Remy had thought that, bleeding and near death in Madripoor, he was gaining the ultimate redemption for a lifetime of sins.  His life was the sacrifice.  But Rogue had pulled him back, unknowing.  She had made her own sacrifice in order to bring him back to another kind of redemption – her love.  The killer, an imperfect mind-reader, knew only two of the elements of the story that was Remy LeBeau – redemption and sacrifice.  Perhaps all this killing was simply a reflection of what the murderer thought he knew.  Perhaps the killings were the sacrifices.  Perhaps each death was a release, another step on the pathway towards redemption.

            But why?

            Remy had left his own form of redemption back on the path.  Rogue had passed him a smile, the kind they'd often shared back in the old days, the confederate smile of a partner-in-crime.  He'd taken Jones aside and told him, in no uncertain terms, that if any harm came to her, he'd end up wishing the murderer would come and put him out of his misery.  Jones had given him one of those inscrutable, maddening looks that he often wore.  Then Eileen had dragged him away, further away from _terra firma _and back towards destination unknown.

            The gun had weighed heavily in his coat pocket.  It was the reason Rogue had given him that smile, the smile that told him everything was going to be all right.  This was a situation not to his liking – he had never been powerless like this before, never been without the heavy reliance on his mutation in order to survive.  It had taken several minutes for him to realise that he didn't even really know how to use a gun.  He could've asked Eileen.  But she had left his side long ago, and even though he knew she was there somewhere behind him, there was no evidence of her presence, not even a sigh, not even a rustle.

            Something was wrong.  He knew it.  It didn't make sense.  So far there had been three sacrifices – death by earth, air and water.  But the killer had suddenly broken the pattern.  And serial killers didn't do that without good reason.  All right, so Remy had forced him to break the pattern.  His next planned victim, Anna Raven, had been stolen from him.  So he had had to choose another girl.  But death by hanging?  Why not by fire, the original, logical method?  Why spoil the ritual sacrifice any more than it had been spoiled already?

            Something wasn't right.  Something was wrong.  He should have turned back.  He didn't.

            The Hanging Tree loomed out from the centre of a small copse like the gnarled, twisted silhouette of the Old Hag.  Tante Mattie had often told tales of her when he was a boy, how she'd jump on your chest while you slept and would ride you, so that you couldn't move, so that you couldn't fight, or even breathe.  Remy had never scared easily, even as a kid.  But now, as he shone the torch up the dark, wet trunk of the old tree, his heart skipped a beat and he knew it was fear inside him.

            Hanging from a branch, tied to the bough by the ankles, swung the trussed up body of a naked woman, unreal, waxen with the eerie lifelessness of an undressed Victorian doll.

            Instinct and horror caused him to avert the light of torch from the pale white husk of the dangling corpse; the circle of brightness swerved into the bushes dripping rainwater like tears. He approached the tree slowly in the darkness, hardly realising that he was neglecting to breathe, stopping only when his foot was sucked into a quagmire of sodden earth with a loud, sudden squelch.  The body of the woman swung provocatively, beckoning him with the hypnotic rhythm of a pendulum.  He moved forward, extricating his foot from the slush, his right hand moving instinctively to the gun in his pocket.  Only force of will stopped him from drawing it out of pure fear.  It was only when he stood before the impermeable black outline of the body that he slowly trailed the torchlight upward, with the dread expectancy of one who walks to the gallows.

            It was her face that seemed to encroach upon the light, not the other way round – a face strangely divorced from the backdrop of tree and night and rain, so that he wouldn't even have thought she was anything more than a puppet hanging on a string.  This was not like looking at Lizzie Brown – this was grotesque, a parody of death, a morbid performance.  The pasty hue of her skin obliterated the features of her thirty-something face.  Her hair, wet and straggled from the rain, was damp to the point that he could not tell its colour.  But her eyes were closed.  Her eyelashes were tipped with beads of water so it appeared she had been crying.

            The killer, however, was nowhere to be seen.

            Remy dropped the circle of light from the non-face.

            "I'm here!" he called.  No answer.  Only the rhythmical patter of rain through leaves offered a reply.  He took a step back, his sense of apprehension increasing unbidden.  Something was definitely wrong…

            He took out the gun with the stealth of the thief, with the stealth of the dead.

            "I'm here!" he called out again, and the sound of his own voice made him bolder. "So if you wanna keep carryin' on dis sick game, y' jus' show yourself, y'hear?!"

            The puppet on the tree groaned.

            At first Remy was stunned to hear so corporeal a sound issue from the un-woman's lips.  He swung the torchlight back onto the body, now gently swaying in the night, sinister and elegant as Nosferatu hanging bat-like from the beams of his sprawling castle.  What he saw terrified him even more than any corpse he might have seen, for the amorphous face had now gained some token of character – the green eyes were now open.

            He stood with the gun in his hand, heavy as a dead-weight; heavy, cold, and immutably alien.  One finger, numb with rainwater, trembled on the trigger.  And the woman, horrendous, inhuman as her naked body damned her to be, gazed back up at him with wide and staring eyes, terrified, bewildered, pleading.  And beneath her lay a single card – the Queen of Diamonds, a stark testament to this, his final betrayal.  Not the _Queen of Wands_ but the Queen of Diamonds, _his_ Queen of Diamonds.

            Only then did he understand what the phrase meant – 'redemption through sacrifice.'  It meant that the hanging woman was a decoy, a deception, an end to an even greater means, a necessary sacrifice for that of the ultimate prize.  The killer wasn't there.  He'd played them – all of them – for fools.  He'd set them up, and now, with both Remy and Eileen out of the way, he was free to capture his real prey, the prey Remy had left ten minutes back the way he had come from, in the care of the steady, reliable, nondescript CSI – Dominic Jones.

            Rogue.

            Behind him, Eileen stumbled into the grove like a woman fated, hair wet and bedraggled, her expression emerging from the shadows, aghast, pale as a ghost.  She lifted her torch and stared at him.

            "Oh my God," she croaked. "Anna…"

***********************************

[1] Uncanny X-Men #276.  Well, technically it wasn't Xavier, but what the hey…

[2] Stupid; idiotic.


	8. A Paradox Unfolded

EDIT: Seems that FF.net was screwing up the past couple of days, so I couldn't read any of your comments.  Probably you didn't receives an alert either.  Anyhow, I've realised that I didn't make something clear at the end of this chapter that I should have, namely the 'relationship' between Anna and the killer.  So I've tried to add and change a few bits just to clarify it.  Or maybe you prefer the relationship the way I wrote it before… If so, please let me know!!!  Or maybe it hasn't worked at all and I've just confused y'all.  In which case I'll try and rewrite again…T_T

Please be warned that there is mature content in this chapter… As usual, reviews and constructive crit encouraged…;)

**************************************************

**. VIII .**

            It was several minutes after Remy and Eileen had left that Rogue noticed that the batteries in her torch were cutting out.  She was looking at her watch – the time read 19:49.  Again that sense of uneasiness touched her, the same uneasiness that had touched her when she had woken up the previous night on the heels of some vague and indescribable nightmare.  She shuddered.  It was too dark for this time of the year.  It had been raining for too long.  She pulled her jacket tighter around her.  That was when the light of her torch had gone from a dazzling white to a jaundiced yellow.  Two minutes later, it had run out.

            "Dammit," she muttered.

            Beside her, Dom Jones was lighting up a soggy cigarette with some effort.  She glanced at him a moment, finding it odd that she had never thought him the type to smoke.  She had never been the type to pigeonhole people; but recently she seemed to be having trouble reconciling her intuitive impressions of others with the inescapable sense that her intuition was not, in fact, her own.  It was as though she was suddenly walking blind and passive, with another entity at the helm of her consciousness.  However many times she would meet someone, her impression of them would remain shapeless and indistinct.  Like her dreams.  Like her nightmares.

            _Anna Raven, get out of mah head_, she thought.

            That thin, wavering thing under her skull went quiet.

            "Ah should have gone in with him," she suddenly spoke out loud in pure irritation. "Ah shouldn't have let him go in alone."

            "He isn't alone, Anna," Dom replied evenly, shielding the glowing tip of his cigarette from the rain. "Eileen is with him, remember?  Besides, he wanted me to take care of you.  The last thing he wants is you going in and following him."

            "Ah still shouldn't have let him go," she murmured, half to herself.  She couldn't shake the feeling that whatever Remy was walking into, it wasn't what it seemed.  When Dom had come knocking for them earlier that evening, the part of her brain that was called 'Anna' had instinctively gone for the gun Rogue had shoved at the back of her drawer two days earlier.  She had given it to Remy, thinking he would need it, despite Eileen's insistences that if the murderer felt threatened he would kill his victim.  After all, who could trust a murderer?  Besides, Remy was powerless just like she was, and he needed some protection.  If Rogue couldn't be there to protect him herself, then giving him the necessary means – whatever the cost – was the next best thing.  There was no way in hell she was ever going to lose him again.

            And now, she was having the awful gut feeling that she shouldn't have let him go at all.

            "Ah'm gonna go in after him," she decided at last. "Somethin' ain't right.  He's got t' pull back.  We should never have let him go in."

            She grasped a hold of Dom's torch, but he held it back fiercely.

            "Are you crazy?" he levelled at her, eyes narrowed. "The killer's in there.  You break into their meeting, you'll ruin everything!"

            "What if it's a trap?" she retorted hotly. "What if there's nothin' in there?  You an' Eileen both figured that the killer was followin' a pattern – he's killin' by usin' the elements.  Why would he be hangin' someone now?  Eileen said herself that ritual serial killers like this guy don't change their method of killin'.  They got a set picture in their head of how everythin' should turn out – if even one li'l thing changes then the whole fantasy's ruined.  Don't tell me that ain't the truth!"

            Dom's lips were thin and tight, almost blue in the dimness.

            "Then that's all the more reason for you not to go in there," he replied quietly.

            Rogue paused, unsettled by the brevity of his statement.  She loosened her hold on the torch and stared at him.

            "What d'you mean?"

            His jaw tensed.

            "You've got to stay here," he replied finally.  The glowing end of his cigarette fizzled out.

            "Ah don't have t' do anythin'," she shot back, frustrated again. "Somethin's screwy here, an' ah ain't standin' around and waitin' for things t' happen.  Ah'm sorry, but that just ain't in mah nature, sugah.  Now y'all gonna come an' help me find Remy or what?"

            She turned back towards the path, but Dom's hand clutched her arm, wrenching it so fiercely that she cried out in surprise.

            "You're not goin' up there!" he growled, spinning her round to face him.  Enraged, she shook her arm free of his grasp, glaring at him.

            "What the _hell_ are you talkin' about?" she spat.

            His eyes, once grim, were now urgent.  His fingers pressed into her arm.

            "What if _you're_ the fantasy, Anna?" he replied, his voice slow, deliberate. "What if the killer's had his sights set on you all along?  If you meet him, what do you think he's going to do, Anna?  What do you think he's going to do to _you_?"

            Rogue froze.  Dom's face was silent, calculating.  His eyes flashed triumphantly as he realised that she finally understood.

            "You mean…Remy…That was why he wouldn't let me be alone by mahself…Why he didn't want me leavin' the motel?" she faltered. "'Cos he thinks _ah'm_ the next victim?"

            "You never knew, did you?" he replied cuttingly, his large, pale forehead creasing.  Water had gathered in the grooves and were running down onto his nose and cheeks.  She had the abrupt, faint image of blood seeping from stone. "_You're_ the Queen of Diamonds, Anna.  The _Queen of Wands_, the next victim on the list.  Remy was an idiot.  He went around calling you that, and when all this talk of tarot cards started up everyone thought _he_ was the killer." He laughed sharply, derisively. "He even told me _all_ about you, Anna, everything that was enough to tell me that _you_ had to be the last one…" He paused, looked up at her suddenly silent face, his lips pursed once more, taut with sudden disdain, eyes narrowed. "_He's_ the one who's set you up, Anna," he continued contemptuously, his fingers moving to grab her arm again roughly. "He's the one who's condemned you.  That's why he's brought you all the way out here with him.  Encase this is all just a trap.  Encase the killer's still really watching _you_."

            The arm that held the torch shook; his glasses gleamed in the spark of reflected light, and he smiled as if at his own brilliance at having worked this out.  But Rogue stiffened, remained quiet, did not resist the tightness of his grasp.  Her own mind was racing as fast as her heartbeat.  _It's him_, she thought frantically. _Mah God, it's _him_…_

            "That's why you're not going anywhere," he continued emphatically. "That's why you're staying right here – with me."

            She waited until the right moment, that impalpable split second when a muscle relaxes in an involuntarily, unheeded motor reaction, a screw in an automated machine.  Dom's fingers, lulled into a false sense of security by her motionlessness, slackened.  With one violent, impulsive jerk of her arm, she had broken free of his grasp.  He stumbled back, surprised; a second later he had raised the torch again, only to see her illuminated form dart in between the trees.

            "Fucking stupid woman!" he cursed.

            Rogue heard him come after her, feet clumsy and uncoordinated as hers were nimble with fear.  But he had the advantage of the torchlight – wherever she went, she knew he would be able to see.  He, it seemed, was not a physical person – he had probably never run cross-country since childhood.  But she, Rogue, had been trained for all types of combat situations and was faster, sprier, and defter than his previous prey.  It was something he could not have expected.  After a while he fell behind, shouting oaths at her; despite the advantage of the torch, he soon lost sight of her; the ring of light danced madly over the sopping branches, dwindling fainter and fainter.  She half-stopped, dodging behind the thick, misshapen trunk of some old tree.  He too halted.  His stertorous breath sounded, a whistling wheeze in the darkness.  She, a master of silence when she knew how, held her breath.

            "Damn you, Anna!" he called, his voice almost drowned out by the storm but not quite. "I know you're there!  And if you don't come back with me now then you're gonna –"

            The sentence ended abruptly on a distinct but slightly muffled thump, followed by a short, sharp thud.  The white beam of the torch skidded across the forest and was abruptly swallowed up into nothingness.  It was only in the ensuing gulf of silence and utter darkness that she realised that she was breathing again.  She remained still, confused as to what had just happened, ears pricked.

            "It's okay, Anna," came a familiar voice into the night. "He's down.  You can come out now."

            It was not Remy.  But it was someone.  She was thankful only to have another soul in there with her.  Warily, she slid out from behind the tree.  Her rescuer's face was framed inside a small, paltry pentacle of orange light, the source of which was the humble flame from some cheap lighter.  She just managed to catch the features before the light went out.

            Chase.

            "It's okay, Anna," the older man repeated, flicking the lighter again. "Ah hit that cocky bastard good an' true.  Ah _knew_ what he had in mind.  But he won't be botherin' you no more."  The flame sprang into life, wavered, guttered, flickered out.  He tutted. "Damn rain," he added.

            Rogue shuddered.  The rain was biting into her bare skin with a cold the likes of which she had not felt before.  Her heart was still racing.  She could only make out Chase's outline for the dark.

            "Ah have t' find Remy," she spoke up breathlessly, looking about, trying desperately to get her bearings.

            "Remy has other things t' deal with." Chase's voice was firm.  Again she heard the twitching scratch of his thumb against the lighter.  The orange light flamed into existence with a fresh intensity; his face, wreathed in shadows, was punctuated only by the reflected light of his eyes. "And we have a problem," he said gravely.  This time the light held.

            "Ah know," she replied, casting her gaze over her shoulder.  A little way behind her, Jones' inert body lay amongst a clump of bushes, blood oozing thickly from a wound to his head.  He stirred, groaning, but did not get up.  His torch was nowhere to be seen. "We're lost, an' we ain't got no proper source o' light."

            "Hm." Chase's tone was contemplative. "A fire would do it."

            "Are you kiddin'?" she scoffed, turning back to him. "You couldn't even get a spark outta wood in this weather."

            He half-smiled, the shadows lengthening across his face.

            "You're right.  B'sides, a fire wouldn't do no good – it consumes, it burns t' ashes.  An' that ain't no good to us, is it Anna?"

            She bent over, searching for the torch, distracted.

            "No, ah guess not.  Even if we could get a fire t' light, it'd only peter out on us.  Best thing is t' find the…"

            She stopped, grasping onto something cold and cylindrical hidden inside the brush – the torch.  But as soon as it was clasped between her frozen fingers, Chase's boot had kicked it out of her hand and back into the undergrowth.

            "What the _fuck_ are you doin'?" she rounded on him, enraged; but he faced her quite calmly in the fading glow of the lighter, his expression solemn.

            "We don't need it," he told her, matter-of-factly. "It's better like this.  The dark is always better for this." He paused, perusing her, head cocked to one side, assessing.  With that look, something cold and inexplicable grasped her, so that she was suddenly quiet, disbelieving.  Though her expression had not changed, he seemed to recognise the subtle transformation inside her – that jangling of neurotransmitters, pheromones, hormones; the increase in her pulse rate, the fine sheen of perspiration on her skin; the imperceptible electric impulses that now coursed through her, unseen yet eloquent.  The flame spurted.  His eyes were glowing in the half-darkness, as if what he felt in her animated the gaunt shadow of a man he had always been.  What she saw wasn't Chase, but a killer.

            And then she understood.

            "It's you, isn't it," she stated quietly, her voice trembling involuntarily.  He simply smiled at her, lifting the lighter, his gaze flickering over her, silent, measured.  His expression was mild; but his eyes, glimmering dimly in the darkness, were ravenous.

            "You're afraid now," he stated calmly.  There was a strange hunger in his eyes, a compulsive greed that would not die, that saddened him because it owned him. "You don't know how happy that makes me – for you, for me, for the both of us.  You've never really been afraid, have you, Anna?  Not the way you're afraid now.  The only thing you've ever been afraid of is yourself.  That intrigues me.  A lot of people, their fear is so constant, so muted that it hardly makes an impact.  But you, you're different.  All that fear, focused so hard inside yourself that it feels like you're gonna implode with it.  It needs to come out, Anna.  It needs to come out so that we can both taste it."

            There was self-satisfaction on his face, as if he had unlocked her greatest secret.  She said nothing.  He frowned momentarily, continued.

            "It's okay, Anna," he assured her soberly. "It's okay.  It's doesn't hurt me, t' feel your pain.  You see, ah'm like you – ah'm a mutant.  Ah can suck up people's emotions like they're water.  All that negativity inside you, ah can get rid of it for you an' make it mine.  An' all those other women, they were in so much pain, it was easy to put them out of their misery."

            Rogue was silent.  She could run, but she had no light and would have no idea of where she was going.  Besides, she seemed to recall that Lorna Dane's secondary mutation was the same as Chase's – she could convert negative emotions into energy, increasing both her strength and agility.  If the same were the case with Chase, Rogue wouldn't stand much of a chance against him, powerless as she was.  He was no telepath, and he could not read her – but he was an empath and could read her fear, and that was enough.

            "You didn't have t' kill them," she returned, quietly, her mind working rabidly for an escape route. "You don't have t' kill me."

            He smiled again, that old, quaint little smile. "On the contrary, ah did, an' ah do.  Ah admit, the others were a bit superfluous, but they were a part o' the ritual, an' ah couldn't just leave them out, could ah?  You, on the other hand, you're the special one.  You're the first and last in the pack.  _La Reine de Diamants_.  The Queen of Diamonds."

            The flame wavered, then slowly flickered out.  His face, his unassuming mask, disappeared, but for the faint kindling glow of his eyes.

            _Queen of Diamonds_.

            "Remy?" she asked into the darkness.  Her breath cleaved into the rain, leaving a misty imprint on the air that she could not see. "Remy wanted you t' do this?"

            "You betrayed him," the darkness replied. "The first thing ah felt when the two of you came into town was that betrayal, the death that you gave him.  Ah couldn't get it out o' mah head. You're the source of it all, Anna, the source of all the pain inside us.  He even tried to get rid of you himself, but ah knew he'd never be able to finish the job.  He cares for you too much.  That's why ah thought ah'd help him out." He paused; the light of his eyes dimmed, and when she next saw them, they were right beside her face; his breath grazed lightly against her bare neck, dispelling the flinty slap of the rain with its rank warmth. "Do you know where the pain inside us comes from, Anna?  Love, hate, death.  That's what you've inflicted on us.  That's what we're going to inflict on you."

            His lips brushed the soft spot beneath her ear; she was aghast to find herself stirring in both revulsion and pleasure.    It horrified her that he knew how to kiss her, that his lips touched her neck with that same familiar tenderness that should not have belonged to him, that he now used to deceive her; it horrified her to know that her repugnance was tainted with that strange, impersonal first flush of arousal.  It could have been with rapture or disgust that lashed out with her fist in the vague direction of his outline; she would never know.  Once upon a time such a blow might have killed a man.  But now he caught her wrist easily, wrestling her back, and she screamed in a frustration that she had never felt before, a frustration at her own impotence.

            Chase laughed.  She had never heard a laugh like it, a laugh of such pure delight, of such unbridled ecstasy.  The rawness of her fear and her frustration was feeding him, and more than that, intoxicating him; for she had never felt fear like this, never felt frustration like this, it was all so new to her, so new and terrifying that she couldn't hold it down… She realised, wildly, that for the first time she _was_ normal, that this was what it was like to be normal, to be afraid of the unknown because she was a part of the unknown no longer.

            That was what terrified her.

            That was why he laughed.

            She fought with him for an indeterminable amount of time – the more she fought, the stronger he became – time held no meaning, it was divorced from their struggle, it no longer contained it.  It could have been minutes or seconds before he became tired of her; it was business as usual when he struck her across the face with his fist, sending her reeling back into the brush so that she knew what it was like to be hit with a strength that was not even a fraction of that which she had once possessed.  She gasped, the pain searing through the left side of her face like a hot knife scoring across her skin.  She attempted to scramble to her feet again – Rogue was never one to lay down and die quietly – but of course, he knew that already.  He knew all that Rogue was and would be, although he would never know where she came from, what her real name was, or how many years had claimed her; all were irrelevant.  What mattered was what he understood of her; the quickening of her breath, the pounding of her heart, the racing of her pulse, the sum of all those indeterminate parts that made her react, that made her undeniably human.

            He knew she would get up and challenge him.  He knew she was a fighter, a scrapper.  His reaction was faster.  That she should challenge him only increased his lust.  She was, after all, _la reine des reines._  He lunged at her, knowing she could not see in the dark as he could; she was bowled over, back into the shrubbery, bewildered, terrified, panting.  Panting!  He was excited.  He held her down, her wet, struggling limbs.  Love, hate and death.  Until a few days ago, the combination had been alien to him.  Now it encompassed him so completely that he wasn't even sure where Chase began and Remy ended.  Nothing seemed so pure and uncomplicated as love, hate and death.

            "We'll do it this way round," he told her, unable to contain his excitement as he held her, as she struggled. "It's better, if we do it this way…  That way, the fire can come later…Don't fight like that gal, we don't want t' hurt you, but it's for your own good…You don't know how much we love you, Anna – almost makes us wish we didn't have t' kill you…"

            Rogue suddenly stopped resisting, her head swimming.  Something was happening inside her skull, she could feel it, like she had felt it the night he had killed Lizzie Brown, like the day he had killed Dottie MacKenzie.  Something was _moving_.  She felt Chase like a feather brushing against the edge of her senses as he released her arm and began fumbling at the flies of her jeans.  Whatever was inside her, she fought it.  She couldn't lose herself now.  She had to keep calm, to concentrate.  She had to remain Rogue…

            A surge of will, and suddenly she was back on the surface.  He had already undone her flies and was whimpering like a sick puppy.  But her arm was free.  One arm!  Without thinking she forced all the strength she could into that one numb limb and swung it round violently into his face.  It connected, so awkwardly that at first she thought she hadn't even hit him.  But it was unexpected enough that Chase was momentarily stunned.  She took that slim window of opportunity to slam her knee into his groin.  He groaned, loosening his grip on her; it was just enough for her to shrug free of her jacket and shove him aside.  He keeled over, groaning and cursing.  Then, without even knowing how, she was onto her feet and running into the arms of the darkness.  

            He came bounding into her periphery a minute later, subtle and insidious as the werewolf, his breath short, hoarse, clipped as her own – she quickened her pace, her hands her only guide in the darkness.  Whatever it was that tripped her had lain hidden; it must have been hidden, she later thought, because the staccato rhythm of his breathing was punctuated by one short, startled yelp before he, too, fell.

            Rogue tumbled into the brush, slipping on slushy wet mud and slick, sodden leaves.  Something scored into her calf as she fell, something sharp and jagged; she felt her own skin tear, shred, erupt into a conflagration of incandescent, unfamiliar pain.  She half-screamed, the cry driven out of her lungs as she hit the ground chest first.  Chase was cursing, but he had the advantage of night vision – she felt his hands straining in the darkness, clambering up her wounded shin, pawing at the hem of her jeans.

            She whimpered, trying desperately to shake his grasp, but her leg was frozen numb with pain and she could not move it.  His fingers were clawing at her, dragging her towards him, but she fought to repel his grasp, twisting her body violently in the mud.  She was wounded, tired, frightened.  The more she fought, the fiercer he became.  She could barely move.  But she couldn't give in.  She just couldn't…

            In silent answer the fish under her skull whispered, shifted, rearranged.  Whatever the stolen souls were doing, they were working for her.  She felt it unequivocally.  She still had a chance.  She only had to fight for it.

            Driving her elbows into the thick, viscous earth, Rogue strained forwards, teeth clenched, eyes streaming with the pain of her wound.  She shunted an inch, stomach sliding in the dirt; but still she held on, so vehemently that the pain of her injury increased.  No.  Mustn't cry out.  Wastes too much energy.  Got to focus.  Got to…

            She bit into her lip so hard it bled; but she'd moved another few inches on her elbows and now the jeans were halfway down her thighs.  Once more inch.  She jammed one elbow into the mire for leverage, only to strike it against something unseen.  The skin ruptured, the bone cracked.  No screaming.  Her teeth gouged into her lip.  She twisted again and suddenly, without warning, she was out of the brush and scrabbling onto the road.  Then it was easy.  She wriggled violently out of the sodden jeans and somehow – in a surge of exhilaration and strength perhaps, she did not know – she managed to get onto her feet.

            Out of the woods.  Out of the wilds.  Onto the road.  Into civilisation.

            She ran down the darkened lane and called out, remembering vaguely that Eileen had stationed cops outside the forest; but her voice was drowned out by the storm and by the time she had covered a few yards the pain had overtaken her and she half-stumbled, half-limped on into the gaping horizon.  No car, no truck, no person was in sight.  Fucking cops!  Her right leg was now throbbing dully and covered in blood.  Her arm was a starburst of agony.

            "Someone!  Please!  Anyone!"  She wept. For the first time, cold, half-dressed, unseen, alone, _normal_, she wept.  And her scar was hurting, her heart was aching so damn much… "Remy!" The name, so familiar, was her only comfort – an incentive for her to fight on.  She scrubbed her eyes, raised her voice. "Help me!"

            Arms came at her from nowhere, and for a frantic second she thought it was him, her lover, her love, until she hit the grass verge and felt that unfamiliar weight on top of her.  Chase was merely a shadow in the dark, inhumanly fast, unnaturally silent; red eyes blazed out at her from some great gulf of seeming nothingness.

            She yelped as he wrestled her onto her back, unable to scream anymore.  She could no longer fight him.  She was too wracked with pain, too cold, too exhausted.  And the scar…

            "Remy," she sobbed.

            "It's okay," he assured her, and his tone was calm, reasonable. "It's all been arranged.  He gave me permission.  He told me himself.  He gave me the signal.  'My Queen o' Diamonds', he said.  You can't fight that can you?  You can't fight the man you love."

            No – he was right in that.  She couldn't.  The agony in her leg and arm rose into a tight crescendo then suddenly and inexplicably descended into numbness.  The world swam.  Rogue could hardly keep her eyes open.

            "You can't fight the man who loves you, can you?"

            Dimness.  So dim, dimmer than the squalid black night.

            Rogue closed her eyes.

            He straddled her, his fingers pushing aside the panties and pressing into her softness.  He exclaimed in ecstasy, she gasped – or thought she did, the mouth was hers, but the voice was not.  Rogue, disembodied, said nothing.  Someone else opened her eyes, someone else felt his rough, callused fingers inside her sex and gasped.  The background, the rain, the faint hum of an engine, all was as dim as the night itself.  He was muttering to her, saying her name, the name he thought was hers, proclamations of love, obscenities.  Then he left off fumbling her, and there was the sound of his hands unzipping his flies, of his grunts as he shifted his hardness against her and…

            Rogue shut out the lights.  Green eyes blazed in the darkness, the eyes of a mystery, a paradox unfolded.  A memory, a memory came, of hands and grunts and hardness.  A memory…

            Lifting her head up to the dripping canopies, Anna opened her mouth and howled.

            That was when the gunshot rang.

            Where Anna's howl ended, Chase's began.  He rolled away from her, shrieking like a wild animal, clutching his bloody, glistening, half-obliterated shoulder.  Anna blinked.

            "Daddy…?" she began, confused; an interpolation of memory onto reality had occurred, covertly; past had folded over unconnected present: what she saw now was not supposed to have happened.  Her eyes lifted to a rescuer that had never come before.  Remy, standing in the road, gun in hand.  She gaped.

            "Step away from her, Chase," he ordered, cocking back the hammer. "Or I swear t' God I'll put a bullet straight through your head."

            Chase seethed – the sound emitted from between his teeth in a vampiric hiss.

            "Don't do this Remy," he croaked.  Blood bubbled between his fingers. "You know this has t' be done.  It's what she deserves, that bitch!  She don't even know what she did to you, but _ah_ know.  Ah _know_.  Ever since you got into town, ah could feel right inside you like _she_ never could."

            "You got dat wrong, Chase," Remy remarked coolly, tracking the line of the barrel against his head. "She been where you been before.  She knows what it's like.  God knows bein' inside my head is bound t' drive anyone insane.  An' it hurts, I know.  You don't have t' do dis."

            "Too late, Remy," Chase spat contemptuously. "This is what you asked for.  You didn't even have to say anythin'.  Ah could _feel_ it.  Why the fuck d'you think ah sent you the _Death_ card?"

            Remy paused and stared, the gun lowered, water trickling down his face, eyes dulled.

            "Death, the soul half 'wake an' half 'sleep," he murmured.

            "So you understood mah message," Chase smirked, scrambling onto his feet. "Ah thought you would.  When you first got here, ah was able to taste the sweetness o' Death, an' it was right inside you, Remy, jus' like it's been inside me the day mah wife an' mah two boys left me.  Been playin' with those damn cards most o' mah life, Remy, just like you play with yours, but for the first time, they came t' life, they had _meanin'_, they _could_ tell the future.  Death was inside you, but it hadn't come t' claim you.  Ah knew it hurt you, Remy, ah knew you felt unfinished.  Ah had t' help you move on."

            "Redemption through sacrifice," Remy mumbled, sudden understanding on his face, but there was no joy, no communion with that knowledge.  Chase nodded, his expression triumphant.

            "Yes – redemption, renewal, rebirth.  All your passion, all your love was dead.  What ah did, ah did for the both of us, Remy.  The Queens were the sacrifice, the ritual of decay, of putrefaction.  First ah purged the queen of earth, the queen of the physical, of the body.  Then air, the mind; and water, the emotions.  Fire is last – regeneration.  She," and he gestured towards Anna lying, shuddering in the grass, "the one who betrayed you, _Queen of Wands_, Queen of Diamonds, she is your phoenix.  This is her own redemption as well as yours."

            "No," Remy shook his head slowly. "She's already redeemed me, she already gave me back my life.  You've got it all wrong, Chase.  She ain't de Queen of Diamonds.  She's my Queen of Hearts.  You're killin' de wrong girl, _homme_.  De cycle's broken.  It's over."

            Chase tottered, silent; what she saw was this – an old man, bedraggled, in the rain, someone else.  But then he growled, low, menacing; quick and fluid as the leopard he sprung at Remy, knocking the gun from his hand and sending it spiralling into the undergrowth.  Remy, taken by surprise, took a deceptively heavy punch to the ground – the next moment, Chase's hands were around his throat, stronger than his scrawny frame belied.

            "You've spoiled everythin'!" he shrieked – Remy didn't think he'd ever heard such despair as what he heard in that voice. "_Everythin'_!  _She_ was meant t' be the last one!  _She_ was the one who was killin' you!  She _had_ t' be the last!"

            In the darkness, 'she' scrambled quietly into the shrub, dragging herself sideways, straining, weeping, gone.

            "_Non_," Remy replied hoarsely. "Without her, I'd be dead anyway.  What you felt dat was lost inside me, it's all inside her.  We belong to each other, body an' soul.  Dat's why Remy's only half here.  'Cos a part o' him is her."

            The fire in Chase's eyes floundered.  His face shrivelled.  His grip withered.  Tears were in his voice.

            "She doesn't _know_," he protested, suddenly weak, impotent. "She doesn't know how cruel and selfish she is, to have stopped you from crossing over.  She _deserves_ t' die.  She deserves t' die so that you can be free, so that you can live again."

            "No." Remy shook his head. "I love her," he said.  He knew it would condemn him.  He was tainted, flawed as she was, a ritual gone wrong, a sin to be cleansed.  That was all he ever was.  Chase was weeping, but his hands tightened again and strangely, a part of Remy wanted it, he wanted to face that fine line once more.

            But Anna is there, on the edge of the road, on her knees, gun poised in one hand, and she doesn't shake, she doesn't hesitate, she was taught so young to handle a gun.

            "You shouldn't have," she sobs, "You hurt meh, you shouldn't have hurt meh, why did you hurt meh so much?"

            Chase turns his head; he feels then, the anguish, the hate, the irreparable wound that is Anna Raven, so acutely that she displaces everything else inside him, and the love and hate and death he feels is no longer Remy's; it is Anna's.  He no longer understands Remy; what he understands is her.  He cannot help but respond to her in kind.

            "Oh Anna," he weeps, though he doesn't even know what he says; the words, the role are not and never were his. "Ah didn't want t' hurt you Anna, ah only did it 'cause ah love you."

            The words are familiar to her.

            Too late, too late to be sorry; his words are merely a revision of a memory long gone, too long gone.

            Taking aim, Anna pulls the trigger and shoots her imagined father dead.

            For the first time, Chase Beddows truly knows what it's like to cross over that hazy line of no-return.

*****************************


	9. Full Circle

**. IX .**

            Anna lay by the roadside, shivering.  The rain had soaked through her skin and the white of her clothing, so that, but for the crimson blood on her bare leg and arm, she seemed to glow with an inner translucence.  Gently Remy lifted her head into his lap.  There was blood, too, on her lips and running down her chin, but he wiped it away with the sleeve of his coat, and she smiled up at him with wearied gratitude.

            "Don't think bad o' meh, Remy," she stammered faintly. "He was goin' t' hurt meh again.  Ah couldn't let him, ah just couldn't."

            He was silent a moment, regarding her, this time-traveller who could go both ways, past and present.  Then he leaned forwards quietly and prised the gun from between her suddenly limp fingers.

            "It's okay," he said at last. "I understand, Anna.  I understand."

            She smiled again, her pupils dilating.  He knew then that she was not shivering from the cold.  Reaching out he pulled her into his arms, held her close to what warmth he had left in him.

            "_Non, non, mon amour_, don't sleep now, you sleep now you might not wake up again." He held her face between his frozen hands, willing her to keep her eyes open, and she looked up at him, mouth open, wanting to say something.  Behind them, dappled light fell onto the road, refracted on the raindrops, and burst into a momentary shower of rainbow.

            Only then did Anna close her eyes and quietly slip away.

****************************************************

            Eileen stood on the edge of the road, calm as the storm about her was not.

            "Looks like we came just in time," she remarked.  Even now, a sense of irony could not help but enter her voice.

            Remy stood slowly as the ambulance crew loaded Rogue onto a stretcher.  From now on she was in good hands.  She would survive.  Rogue was a born scrapper.  And Anna?  Whether dead, or gone, or even if she had never existed at all – Anna was a fighter too.  He would go with her, to the local hospital, while the cops cordoned off the area, while the CSI's worked the crime scene, while the rain soaked into Chase.

            "I'll say," he snapped bluntly.  He was tired and anxious for Rogue, but nevertheless he could not hide his irritation at her impregnable composure.  Eileen smiled.

            "You should be going with her," she said.

            He nodded, silent.  Then he reached into his pocket and put the gun into her outstretched hand.  She stared at it, questioning.

            "_You_ killed him?" she asked incredulously.

            "_Mais oui_," he answered, and there was the hint of the old scoundrel in that voice. "I _am_ s'pposed to be _Death_ after all."

*************************************************

            When Rogue awoke, it was to find a typically exhausted but conscious Remy beside her, and her arm and leg infuriatingly incapacitated.  Otherwise she would have hugged him with every limb she possessed.

            "Ah thought ah dreamt ah saw my…" she began, out of the blue, before realising that she had forgotten what she had thought she had dreamt she had seen.  He stared at her.

            "You still delirious, chere," he said, but he was smiling.

            "Ah didn't know ah was s'possed t' be in the first place," she grumbled, looking around.  Hospital.  Ugh.

            "You been talkin' outta your cute butt the past day or so," he replied comically, but his hand squeezed hers with all the relief and tenderness in the world. "Still, I guess dat stands t' reason since dey been pumpin' you full o' morphine."

            "Oh.  Ah see."

            She squeezed his hand back.  They laughed.

            "Oh," she groaned, once they'd sobered. "It sure hurts t' laugh."

            "Didn't t'ink you'd have much t' laugh 'bout," he replied softly, his face full of concern. "Not after what happened wit' dat lunatic Chase an' all…"

            "Ah got a scare," she admitted sombrely. "But it takes a lot t' bring this Mississippi River rat down t' her knees – you know that.  Besides, ah can't remember much o' what happened after that maniac tried t' force himself on me."

            Remy's expression was one of surprise.

            "You can't remember?"

            "Nope, not a shred.  Must be the morphine." She lay back, feeling suddenly sluggish.  She could barely even keep her eyes open. "Remy?" she began drowsily, closing her eyes.

            "_Oui, mon coeur_?"

            "Did Chase…did he _hurt_ me?"

            Remy smiled, smoothed back the hair from her forehead.

            "_Non_.  He didn't.  I wouldn' have let dat happen t' you, chere."

            "Good.  Ah wouldn't want anythin' like that t' come b'tween us."

            "Not while there's a breath left in my body, _p'tit_."

            "Really?"

            She felt him press a kiss to her forehead.

            "Really."

***********************************************

            Two weeks later, Rogue was up and about and taking great pains to hide her hobbling.  Summer had gone off the boil – autumn was beckoning, if not round the corner, then certainly round the block.  Rogue was outside, dumping their luggage onto the bike and attempting to tie the whole thing securely, cursing every now and then when her lack of a working left arm prevented her from doing so.

            Remy snuck up from behind, eyeing that pert little leather-clad ass with a small grin on his face.  He had the odd sense of having come full-circle, but had no idea why.  Taking full opportunity of the fact that she was preoccupied with her helpless task, he stole up behind her and pinched her behind intimately.  The elastic cord did a somersault into the air with a resounding twang, and landed some distance away on the tarmac.

            "Remy!" Rogue exclaimed, turning on him in frustration.

            "D'you know how sexy you are, even wit' your arm in a sling and a crutch for your leg?" he crooned seductively, slipping an arm round her waist.

            "Ah do _not_ have crutch!" she protested hotly, nevertheless making no move to extricate herself from his clutches.

            "Which makes you even sexier," he murmured, pre-empting any wisecrack remark she would have made by kissing her passionately on the mouth, knowing that once he did so she'd forget to be indignant.  Of course, once they were locked in the clinch she was as enthusiastic about the kiss as he was.

            "Ahem."

            At the sound they broke apart quickly, Rogue blushing perfunctorily, to see Eileen standing innocently nearby.

            "Geez, Eileen, why do you always have to pop up at de most inopportune moments?" Remy grumbled.

            "I wouldn't be a good CSI if I didn't," she grinned, stepping forwards now that it was safe and eyeing the bike. "So I take it you're leaving?"

            "If we stay here another minute I might as well go shoot myself," he half-scowled, picking up the neglected cord and securing the baggage.

            "Hey – no more shooting," Eileen prodded him affectionately. "You've done enough for one so-called sabbatical."

            "Believe me, chere, dis is one o' de _least_ action-packed vacations dis Cajun's ever had," he joked sarcastically. "So why you here, Eileen?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be at work?"

            "I'm on sabbatical," she explained wryly. "And besides, I thought I'd come and say goodbye."

            Rogue was standing nearby, smiling inscrutably.  Remy saw the familiar look.  Her eyes would darken, her cheeks would dimple, and, almost imperceptibly, he would catch shades of 'Anna'.

            "You called her, didn't you," he stated wryly.

            Rogue shrugged. "We owe her."

            "Actually, Anna _did_ invite me down," Eileen conceded. "She said you had a present for me."

            "We do," Rogue grinned.  She reached into one of her bags and brought out a book, handing it to the blonde woman. "Ah figured you might want some lighter readin' for a change."

            Puzzled, Eileen looked at the cover; then her face softened.

            "It's one of St. John's," she said, her voice suddenly very quiet.

            "We signed it," Rogue continued warmly. "Just so's you can remember, not all X-Men are as bad as you think they are."

            Eileen's eyes were moist as she opened up the book.

            "'Anna Raven'," she quoted with a smile. "So you're keeping that name?"

            "Ah guess," Rogue answered shortly. "Anna's a part o' me now.  Don't seem wrong t' keep her around."

            Remy, turning away, said nothing.

            Later, after Eileen had left, it was time for them, too, to go.  Remy mounted the bike, itching absently at Vargas' scar.  Recently it had been healing over again, and it hadn't bled since the day of Annie Walters' death.  He suddenly wished he had asked Eileen about the connection he and Rogue shared because, over the past couple of days, he hadn't been able to feel it at all.

            "Hey, no fair!" Rogue exclaimed from behind. "It's mah turn t' ride!"

            "No way!" he pouted childishly at her. "You wanna kill us?  You couldn't ride a tricycle in dat state!"

            "Ah so can, an' you know it," she shot back.

            "Oh, I know _ma chere_ can ride jus' fine," he returned smoothly, raising an eyebrow with more than just a hint of suggestion. "But right now, far as I'm concerned, you can _bec mon chu_[1]."

            She smirked, climbing up to straddle his lap and folding her arms round his shoulders.

            "Ah can think of a lot better places t' kiss, swamp rat," she purred.  He grinned, placing his hands on her hips and capturing her lips with a soft familiarity.  He couldn't remember the last time they'd bantered so many innuendoes back and forth in one exchange.  Yup – everything was pretty much getting back to normal again.

            "Hmm." He pulled away from her and pretended to think about it. "You can do whatever you want wit' dis Cajun's body, just on one condition."

            She stared at him, green eyes smouldering.

            "What?"

            "You promise t' grow your hair back again.  Gambit misses playin' wit' your lovely long locks."

            She grinned.

            "Sounds like a deal."

            "Good.  Now _I'm_ drivin'."

            She sighed, conceded, and scrambled onto the back behind him.

            "So where we goin'?" she asked, resting her chin on his shoulder.

            "I dunno.  Figured we could head west, just like de pioneers."

            "Oh, ah see.  California: sun, sea, sand and…"

            "Trust me, chere," he grinned, revving up the motor. "We won't need sun or sea or sand for _dat_."

            He sped off suddenly without warning and she wrapped her arms round his waist, clinging onto him, crying out with exasperation and delight.

            By the time they had reached Valle Soleada, their scars had healed without trace.

- END -

******************************************

[1] 'Kiss my ass'.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Endnotes & Thanks…**

First off I'd like to plug the two fics that inspired this story – An' Everythin' Nice by Letanica, and Seether by Randirogue. They're in my fave stories list, and if you haven't read them, I really recommend you go read 'em now! ^-^

Thanks to:

_Patchverse-SheCat_: Can't say enough thanks for the reading so much of my work and, more importantly, for your honest and helpful comments. It means more than I can say. *hugs* :)

_Randirogue_: In short, for inspiring me. What more can I say??

_Letanica_: Heh, well I hope I did you proud in the end, mon ami ;). Thanks for tagging along, and leaving your lovely reviews! And I can't wait to read more of your shorts when you post them, dear! ^^

_Seven Sunningdale_: I can honestly say that I've never had such fun reading comments before! And I still can't believe you picked out so many of the little symbolic things I threw in there! You have to be just about one of the most perceptive readers I've met. Thankees very much for sharing your thoughts! :D

_ChaosCat_: Well, how is it, how is it?? I'm still dying to know what you thought of the final 'twist', and whether I fell flat on my face… But anyhow, thanks for your wonderfully insightful comments, I've enjoyed your reviews no end. I hope to be reading more from you soon *hint hint* ;) *hugs*

_Vicki Lew_: I still can't believe you've been reading this. You're like…a RoGambit fanfic legend, to me anyway, who's been reading your stuff for ages. I hope I didn't disappoint you too much in making the murderer Chase. I guess I made the pointers that it was going to be him a little too obvious *sigh*. But thanks anyway, for leaving your comments, I feel honoured.

_Jean1_: Thanks for the reviews you left me. It was nice to read something that was balanced and straight to the point. You've really helped me see where I can use some brushing up, so thanks for that. :)

_Ishandahalf_: Gal, you make me giggle when I read your comments. And you have no idea how much that brightens up my day ^^.

_Jukebox_: Wow! Thanks for sticking throughout so many of my stories! You're a gem! *hugs*

_T._ : Yeah, Remy was being an ass back there… I hope he made up for it though. ;)

_Millie_: I'm so happy that you've liked this fic, and thank you so much for the wonderful comments that you left. They meant a hell of a lot to me.

_Shawn Reed_: Well, I have to mention you, if only for the fact that you've read practically (well, nearly. Okay, not even near, but what the hell) every single original story I've ever written, and yet you read my crappy fangirlish fanfics. Now that deserves a medal and more. ;)

And thanks to everyone else who left their comments on this fic and helped to make it what it was. Your reviews were greatly appreciated and really inspired me to carry on with my writing. Thanks y'all, an' a big ol' bunch o' hugs to everyone…:D


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